Tableau Cookbook – Recipes for Data Visualization

Creating arithmetic calculations

In the previous recipe, we looked at String manipulations. In this section, let us focus on manipulations on numbers. However, before we move to arithmetic calculations, we must first understand the difference between aggregated and disaggregated measures. To elaborate on this, let us see an example. The two formulae are SUM(Profit) / SUM(Sales) and SUM(Profit / Sales).

The question is, whether these two formulae will give the same result or will they give different results?

From what we have learnt in school, we know that the Bracket operations or Parentheses will be computed first. We know this methodology as PEMDAS (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract). Since many people tend to say brackets ...