Innovative Tableau

Chapter 82. How to Turn Data Normalization On and Off

Data normalization is the process of adjusting values from different scales to a common scale, providing a better apples-to-apples comparison of the values. For example, looking at varying metrics like “total cheeseburgers eaten per year by US state,” “total high fives given per year by US state,” and “total vacation days taken per year by US state,” will likely show that California leads the way in all three categories. This makes it sound like California is the best place to be in the US, and maybe it is, but these results are most likely due to California having the highest population (i.e., more people around to give each other high fives).

A better analysis would be to determine how many high fives are given per person per year by US state. There are several ways to normalize data in Tableau including changing the aggregation of a measure, creating a calculated 100-point index, or setting a common baseline. There are also times when it’s valuable to see the raw, unnormalized numbers so that our end users have the context of the original scales.

This chapter shares a method for normalizing data and providing you and your end users the ability to toggle the normalization on and off.

How to Toggle Between Actual and Normalized Data

As mentioned, there are several methods for normalizing data in Tableau. For this tutorial, we provide a means for our end users to toggle a metric between Sales by US State (unnormalized) and ...