This is a follow up post to Fiscal Calendar Calculations Cheatsheet for Tableau.

Excel is a very important tool for data analysis and calculations. It's also an important data repository for Tableau. Some of the calculations can be made in Excel before the data is loaded into Tableau or other tools.

So here we are going to show the conversion from a regular date to a week-based financial calendar date, via Excel formula. We still use Apple's 5-4-4 Fiscal Calendar as an example.

The First Week of a Fiscal Year

It is the week that includes October 1st which is an Anchor Date. From the first week, we can determine the Fiscal Year.

Fiscal Year

Here is the formula for calculating Fiscal Year.
Note that B2-WEEKDAY(B2)+1 is the first day of the fiscal year. From this day on, the new fiscal year starts.

The First Day of the Fiscal Year

In the above Fiscal Year calculation, we used B2-WEEKDAY(B2)+1 to get the first day of the week that includes date B2. This is equivalent to DATETRUNC('week', B2) function in Tableau.

Leap Fiscal Year

A common fiscal year has 52 weeks and a leap fiscal year has 53 weeks. We will use this property to determine if a fiscal year is a leap year or not.
This formula allows us to get the total number of weeks between the start dates of two consecutive fiscal years.

The formula can be simplified a little: (E2-WEEKDAY(E2)-(D2-WEEKDAY(D2))/7

The logic test can be written as E2-WEEKDAY(E2)-(D2-WEEKDAY(D2)=371. If true, then it is a leap fiscal year.

Fiscal Week

The fiscal week of a common date is its distance to the start week of the fiscal year.

Fiscal Month/Period

In a common fiscal year, we will have 5-4-4 weeks for each of the 4 fiscal quarters. In a leap fiscal year, we will have 5-4-5 weeks in the first fiscal quarter. That is, the 3rd fiscal month/period will have 5 weeks in a leap fiscal year instead of 4.

Here is the formula for calculating fiscal month/period

Fiscal Quarter

It's easy to create the formula for getting fiscal quarters from fiscal months.

Demo File for Download

We have an Excel file for you to download (Click link and open it in Google spreadsheet. Go to File and click Download.) It has all the above formulas and all the fiscal years in the next 1000 years. Feel free to use it in your data analysis.

Conclusion

With the above formulas, we save the dependency on a database table for converting a common date to fiscal date. The above example is based on a 5-4-4 week-based fiscal calendar. It may not match exactly your fiscal calendar. Nonetheless it may give you some ideas for creating your conversion formulas.

Feel free to leave comments or contact me at @aleksoft at twitter.
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Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button.

(Addendum: Jonathan Drummey has a much better Tableau-only solution that I missed from his presentation. I only caught later part of the presentation. You might ask him about it if you know him.)

In a recent presentation, Tableau visionary HOF Jonathan Drummey talked about a solution for a variable row heights in a text table. The question apparently came from a perfectionist tableau designer. Tableau is not really made for text processing.

[Forward: I asked ChatGPT o1-mini who then wrote this. Hope it helps. All the credit and the blame go to ChatGPT.

I went over the plan and it looked decent. Whether it can be done in 30 days or not, it depends on the person and the time he spends on it. By the way, ChatGPT can be a really good study buddy. Ask it questions whenever you have any.]

This comprehensive 30-day plan is designed to take you from a Tableau beginner to an advanced user.

Mundane charts are those basic ones that all data visualization beginners can create, possibly with Show Me in Tableau. They are the boring ones at times because many people tend to create fancier ones just to show off. 

I actually like the mundane ones a lot because they are not only easy to create but also easy to be read by the stakeholders.

Pareto chart is a very powerful tool, providing great insights into the data set and into the business at stake.

A while ago, Sharon came to me asking a question regarding Pareto Chart Multiples. That is, per each category, there is a Pareto chart. And we need to create Pareto charts for all the categories. This chart allows us to quickly view the few most important factors that matter to the majority of output in each category. 

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) is the father of the 80/20 rule: 80% of output are produced by 20% of input. It works magically well through all the years.

[Update: The product manager Wilson Po alerted me that the Viz Extension is still a work in progress. It will not be part of the incoming version 2024.1. Instead, it will be released later in 2024. Just be patient]

Tableau 2024.1 is coming. I got a chance to test drive it. As I wrote a bunch of posts on Sankey chart tutorials in the past, I am most excited by the new Sankey chart type. Here I would like to share what I learnt. This is a quick preview. Your comments are welcome.

Buzzfeed recently asked Midjourney to draw images of people in 50 US states.  So the AI drawing tool created 50 images of couples that represent its perception of the people in each state.

I just put the images into a tiled map in Tableau. Each image is added as a background in each tile.

And also I added Viz-in-tooltips to enlarge an image to look at more details.

Feel free to download the workbook and explore it.
1

The folks at Business Expert had a brilliant idea. They asked AI's perception on UK banks as a dog. I am inspired to do the same on US banks.

ChatGPT is asked to confess its perceptions on top US banks as a dog. Then Midjourney is tasked to generate the images. Check out what dog is matched to your favorite bank.

All are put together into a single-sheet Tableau dashboard. Feel free to check it out.

Through my previous post on the new Sankey chart type, I got in touch with Wilson, the product manager leading the development of this new chart type. I made some comments on creating multi-level Sankey via cascading of single Sankey's. He told me it can be done already by dropping more dimensions into the Level card.

As an enthusiastic user of Sankey charts, I am excited to learn that a Sankey chart type is being piloted in Tableau Public (Web Edit only). I wrote about Sankey chart design in multiple posts. Sankey chart may appear in different forms depending on applications. 

I played a little with it just to evaluate it. Here are my initial findings and comments.

1. The basic Sankey

I can quickly create a Sankey with 2 dimensions and 1 measure.
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