Tableau Desktop Certified Associate: Exam Guide

Functions related to obtaining substrings from a string

One of the most common use cases when dealing with strings is that we want only parts of the string and not all. Many functions help us to do that. Let's have a look at what functions we can use.

LEFT: This follows the syntax LEFT (string, num_chars).

Using LEFT, the num_chars specified starting from the start of a string is returned. This becomes very useful for grouping.

For example, we want to find the customers who have ordered the most, based on what letter their name starts with. We could create a calculation as follows: LEFT([Customer Name,1). This will return only the first character of the string. We can then use this and count the number of orders to clearly see which category ...