With the latest 2024.3 release, Tableau has rolled out a new viz extension called, “Tableau Table”. I took it for a spin and was delighted to find some very exciting features! Here’s a quick walkthrough with some key differentiators that make this viz extension a game-changer.
To begin, you can access this feature by clicking on the Marks Card on a new sheet, and selecting +Add Extension.
A dialog box will open and you will find it listed under the ones “Built by Tableau + Salesforce”.
Once you click on Tableau Table, a window appears with additional information. Click Open to proceed. We are now ready to begin building our table.
Begin building your table by dragging both the dimensions and measures to the details card. You can add them in any order you wish – measures can be before or after dimensions. This is pretty revolutionary. With a traditional crosstab build, all dimensions must be on rows, and therefore appear on the left in the table “header”. Measure Names would be on columns with Measure Values on text, forcing all measures to appear to the left of the dimensions. I’ve come across several real-world examples when there has been a need for a dimension to be mixed in together with measures. In this use case example, you can see I’ve placed Ship Date (a dimension) after SUM(Sales) (a measure).
You can rename column headers to be more intuitive. In this example, I’ve renamed SUM(Sales) to Order Amt $.
It is also possible to format each column independently with a few easy steps. Click on the drop-down menu button beside the column name, select Format. This opens a formatting dialog box. Here you have a few choices on how you wish the data to be displayed – for example, you can change it to be data bars, and you can apply rules to format the color and font. Note, if you change your mind and want to revert back to the original formatting, the back arrow won’t work. You need to access the drop-down menu again and select “Clear Formatting”. It’s also worthwhile noting there are other options here as well, including specifying how to sort the data.
Last but not least, you can customize the overall appearance of the table by accessing the ‘format’ button on the toolbar.
This opens a dialog box with several options, including adding filters under each column header, and the ability to add “Show Excel Download” button. This feature in itself is the golden nugget – in most real-world use cases, the purpose of building a text table similar to this would be to provide a validation spreadsheet for end-users. The excel download button is a dream – with one click, the end-user has a spreadsheet AND the formatting carries over as well. Brilliant!
Here’s an example of my formatted Tableau Table:
And a screenshot of the ‘downloaded to Excel’ version:
Unfortunately it is not possible to publish this to Tableau Public (yet) but if you’d like to see my workbook with this Superstore example, I’d be more than happy to send it to you! I think you’ll find it very intuitive and easy to build. Well done, Tableau!
Happy Vizzing!
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