Data Source-Based Lookups in Tableau

Last week, Klaus Schulte and I had some conversations about how to lookup previous records' information in Tableau. After lots of back and forth, we ended up with a variety of different solutions. We felt like these solutions might be useful to a broad audience of Tableau users, so we wrote a joint blog together. Here's a quick preview:

THE CHALLENGE

Last week at work I (Klaus) puzzled my head over an interesting question. I was looking at production orders and production dates and had to calculate differences between production dates:

• If a production order has consecutive production days (the datediff between the days is 1) then the machine only has to be equipped once.
• If the datediff between two production days is >1, the machine has to be equipped on each production date.

THE TABLE CALCULATION-APPROACH

My first impulse was: Table Calculations! This should be something lookup() should do easily for me!

Adapting my question to superstore data, I’m looking at customers and order dates. I created this lookup-formula, let it restart every customer and was ready to go:

If you'd like to read the entire blog, hop over to Klaus's blog to check it out: Data Source-Based Lookups in Tableau

Ken Flerlage, March 12, 2019

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