Tableau Desktop Certified Associate: Exam Guide

Example 3 – cohorts

Using the Global Superstore dataset, we want to see how many sales were generated in 2012 for customers (Customer ID) making their first purchase (Order Date) in that year. This is what is usually called a cohort analysis, and is often seen in the exam.

For each customer, we first have to define their earliest date of purchase. To do so, we create a calculated First Order Date field as {FIXED [Customer ID] : MIN([Order Date])}. This will take the earliest Order Date in the entire dataset for each Customer ID.

We can then create a visualization with Year([Order Date]) as columns, Year([First Order Date]) as rows, and SUM([Sales]) as measures. This gives the following:

Customers making their first order in 2012 have therefore ...