From the course: Tableau: Mastering Calculations

Running total - Tableau Tutorial

From the course: Tableau: Mastering Calculations

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Running total

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Let's look at the total price per month per category. It's interesting to see the progression here, but what I actually want to know is our cumulative sales. So which category has had the steepest increase in sales since the start of our business? Hence, we are interested in the running total. Let's think about it. What do we want to calculate the running total on? We are interested in the running total of our sales. So meaning the sum of our total price. So in the rose container, we go to this green pill, the sum of total price, and take a look at the context menu. Right at the bottom, we can find quick table calculations and select the running total. What changes when I click on this? We can see that the sales curve now shows completely different values and accordingly, the label has changed as well. This last value is obviously much higher than before because now it is cumulated. We also see that the axis shows a different scale from before, to be able to display the now much higher values. The axis also has a different label now. It's now called running sum of total price. We also see a small triangle or delta at the green pill, SUM(Total Price), in the column container. With this little triangle, Tableau indicates that we are using a table calculation here. We don't exactly know which one, but we see that we no longer just use the values that the database gives us, but instead, we add an aggregation on top. If you want to return to the original value, we simply go back to the context menu and select "Clear Table Calculation". The triangle disappears, the lines return to the previous values, and the axis also looks normal again and has its old label. Now let me show you what other table calculations you can use in the following videos.

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