Which approach should the consultant use to produce the desired result?

A consultant creates a histogram that presents the distribution of profits across a client’s customers. The labels on the bars show percent shares. The consultant used a quick table calculation to create the labels.

Now, the client wants to limit the view to the bins that have at least a 15% share. The consultant creates a profit filter but it changes the percent labels.

Which approach should the consultant use to produce the desired result?
A . Use a calculation with TOTAL() function instead of a quick table calculation.
B . Add the [Profit] filter to the context.
C . Filter with a table calculation WINDOW_AVG(MIN([Profit]), first(), last())
D . Filter with the table calculation used to create labels.

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

When a filter is applied directly to the view, it can affect the calculation of percentages in a histogram because it changes the underlying data that the quick table calculation is based on. To avoid this, adding the [Profit] filter to the context will maintain the original calculation of percent shares while filtering out bins with less than a 15% share. This is because context filters are applied before any other calculations, so the percent shares calculated will be based on the context-filtered data, thus preserving the integrity of the original percent labels.

References: The solution is based on the principles of context filters and their order of operations in Tableau, which are documented in Tableau’s official resources and community discussions123.

When a histogram is created showing the distribution of profits with labels indicating percent shares using a quick table calculation, and a need arises to limit the view to bins with at least a 15% share, applying a standard profit filter directly may undesirably alter how the percent labels calculate because they depend on the overall distribution of data. Placing the [Profit] filter into the context makes it a "context filter," which effectively changes how data is filtered in calculations:

Create a Context Filter: Right-click on the profit filter and select "Add to Context". This action changes the order of operations in filtering, meaning the context filter is applied first.

Adjust the Percent Calculation: With the profit filter set in the context, it first reduces the data set to only those profits that meet the filter criteria. Subsequently, any table calculations (like the percent share labels) are computed based on this reduced data set.

View Update: The view now updates to display only those bins where the profits are at least 15%, and the percent share labels recalculated to reflect the distribution of only the filtered (contextual) data.

References:

Context Filters in Tableau: Context filters are used to filter the data passed down to other filters, calculations, the marks card, and the view. By setting the profit filter as a context filter, it ensures that calculations such as the percentage shares are based only on the filtered subset of the data.