Use Tableau Calculations to Rename a Field (Without Losing the Original)

Use a Tableau Calculation to Rename a Field (Without Losing the Original)

Contributed by: Christopher Gardner

Difficulty level: Beginner

Sometimes the simplest things are difficult to do in Tableau. You’ve connected to a data source and you’re working with your data in Tableau. You drag a dimension up to your columns to divide your data. Everything looks good, but the field name from the data source is not intuitive. You could easily rename it, but you want to keep the original field intact for future enhancements. How can you rename a field without actually renaming it?

It turns out there are a couple of ways to do this. Both do the same thing, but they accomplish the goal in two separate ways.

Duplicate and Rename

The easiest way to rename a field without altering the field itself is to duplicate it. The right-click menu on any field in your Data pane offers an option to duplicate the field. It simply creates the same field again with the word “(copy)” appended to the name. If you look closely, you may notice that this new field is a calculation. If you right-click and edit that calculation, you’ll see that the calculation is literally the original field. So, duplicating the Category field will create a Calculated field with “Category (copy)” as the name and [Category] as the calculation. Use this duplicate field in your visualization and rename it as you choose. The new field is the same as the original, but you can rename it without altering the original.

Create a Duplicate ...