Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook

Different types of calculated fields

There are different types of calculated fields. They differ in function and behavior. They also differ in where they are executed and in what order.

Regular calculated fields

Let us look some different levels in the fields:

Row level

Simple calculated fields are fields that include expressions and/or formulas and are typically handled by the data source.

Row-level calculated fields are fields that can be calculated at the row level or the most granular level. For example, look at the following formula for concatenating a series of strings—first name, a space, and a last name:

FirstName + " " + LastName

The preceding code can derive the full name using only the information within the row itself. It does not need to ...