LOOKUP

In a previous post I walked through a LOD (level of detail) based alternative to the LOOKUP table calculation. In that example I was looking at sales last month, and in a recent Tableau Forums question someone was asking if it could be extended to determine average sales from the previous three months. The answer was “yes” and you can check the whole thread on the Forums, including other options. The main difference from my previous post is that we needed to extend the group numbers from two to four, so that any given month falls into 4 “higher level groups” that we can target with a LOD. We then chose which LOD to use based on the index (_i). ...

The LOOKUP table calculation in Tableau is really handy when you want to show or use a value from a previous row in the view. For example if you are showing sales per month and need to use the sales figure from the previous month to calculate month-on-month growth. In the example above our calculation for “Sales last period” is: ...