Innovative Tableau

Chapter 60. 3 Ways to Use the Describe Feature

The Describe feature in Tableau is one that somehow took me years to stumble upon but is now one of my favorites. If you’ve heard of this feature, you’ve most likely used it to describe an individual dimension, measure, set, or parameter. Right-clicking a field and then choosing Describe gives you information such as the data type and which table it comes from, but there are several other ways to use the Describe feature in Tableau to help you speed up your learning and analyses.

This chapter shows you:

• How to get the most out of the aforementioned usage
• A method for reverse engineering somebody else’s (or your own) Tableau workbooks
• A way to view underlying formulas and parameter allowable values.

These tips have several benefits including saving processing time of your VizQL queries, speeding up your learning or reminding you of your previous approaches, and making your calculated field writing more efficient.

This chapter uses the Super Sample Superstore dashboard to show you three different applications of the Describe feature in Tableau.

Using Describe to Save Processing Time

As mentioned, if you’re familiar with this feature, you’ve likely right-clicked an individual field and chosen Describe to learn more about the field’s properties.

Here’s what is shown when doing this for the Segment dimension in the Sample – Superstore dataset:

My favorite part of the description when used with a dimension is that ...