TRL – Tooltip Exclude and Top N with Others

Here is a quick “Tableau Request Live” post — I wanted to be sure I published this short (but helpful) TRL video on the blog! This video covers two situations you might run into in Tableau: A tooltip ‘Exclude’, and creating a Top N with Others view of your data.

Tooltip Exclude

In the video, Joe Mako and I explore the behavior of choosing the ‘Exclude’ option in a tooltip.  The key to this ‘Exclude’ option in a tooltip is that we are essentially creating a filter based on the active dimensions in the view — in the video example, there are two dimensions in the view that impact what is filtered when the tooltip ‘Exclude’ option is chosen — by converting one of those Dimensions into a Measure, we ensure that the ‘Exclude’ only filters on the single intended dimension.

Top N with Others — Using a Set for the ‘Top N and Others’ Removes Complexity

We also walk through a simple Top N with Others example that leverages a Conditional Set, and a RANK() table calculation to create a “Top 10 with Others” view in Tableau — this method seemed a bit easier than using Table Calcs on top of Table Calcs to create the final view.

This method can remove some complexity, since a Set can be referenced in a row level calculation (in other words, we can create a Dimension based on a Conditional Set in a calculated field–this is shown in the video at around the 6:30 mark), whereas a Table Calc would need to best nested within another Table Calc, and each and every Table Calc would have to be set up with the correct “Compute Using”, or Partitioning/Addressing, for the dimensions in the view.  See this post from Interworks for an example of the added complexity when using Table Calcs alone for this type of problem.

Using the Set method for the Top N also makes it simpler to further explore the “Top N and Others” view — in this example, we place a simple Percent of Total measure in the view, and doing so is incredibly simple since we can base the Percent of Total on the dimension resulting from the Set (this is shown in the video at around 11:48 mark).  We can also turn on Grand Totals, and everything works beautifully since we’re only dealing with a single level of detail in the view — that level of detail is defined based on the single dimension in the view, the [Items] dimension that resulted from the calculation on the Set–that calc was defined in the video as:

IF [In Top N] then [Product Name] else ‘Others’ END

There are several alternate/related methods for obtaining a Top N with Others type of view in Tableau.  Below are some links that explore options.

Alternate/Related Links on Top N and Others:

https://www.interworks.com/blogs/dwyers/2014/10/07/tableau-tuesday-how-create-top-10-and-all-others-report

http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/top-n-and-others-sets

http://breaking-bi.blogspot.com/2013/02/creating-top-n-filter-with-other.html

Additionally, this type of question comes up often on the Tableau Forums – a quick search on the Tableau Community Welcome page will exemplify that (for more info on how to search the Forums, see this post):
http://community.tableausoftware.com/search.jspa?q=TOP+N+others

I hope you find this video and the blog post helpful as you navigate your way through learning Tableau.  I am still learning more and more about Tableau as I explore these scenarios with Joe Mako, and others, on a regular basis.

Your feedback on the videos and the related blog posts is welcomed.  Since the videos are recorded “live”, we hope you will find them useful, even without much added commentary and/or details.  We hope the videos themselves help you to learn more about how Tableau works, and enable you to choose a path that will lead you to your desired results.

Until next time.