Ever added a reference line to your Tableau visualization, only to see it appear in the grand total row, even when it doesn’t make sense?

If your grand total uses a different aggregation than your main data (e.g., SUM vs. AVG), the reference line can be misleading. 

Unfortunately, Tableau doesn’t offer a simple way to exclude it—but there’s a trick to removing it while keeping your totals visible.

In the video below, I’ll walk you through the step-by-step solution to remove reference lines from grand totals.

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Learn how to build a stunning waffle chart in Tableau using map layers and calculations! 

This advanced Tableau tutorial will show you how to simplify the creation of waffle charts while unlocking powerful design and flexibility for your data analysis projects.

You’ll Learn How To:

- Connect Tableau to Superstore and a waffle chart template with Relationships

- Use the MakePoint function to create dynamic map-based charts

- Apply map layers for advanced customization and perfect label placement

Why You Need This:

This method combines advanced Tableau charts with the flexibility of map layers, allowing you to:

1. Create precise grid-based waffle charts.

2. Perfectly center labels without complex workarounds.

 Who Is This For?

- Data analysts looking to enhance their Tableau dashboards

- Advanced Tableau users exploring new chart techniques

🔗 Workbook  |  Data

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Labeling a rounded bar has always been tricky. You might manually drag the labels, try to play around with the alignment and more, but still, you can't get the labels perfect.

No more! In this Tableau Tip, I'll show you:

1. Why standard labels don't work

2. How to build a rounded bar chart

3. How to perfectly align the labels

Build 80% of your dashboards with these 4 charts, a bit of interactivity, and that's it.

You probably won't need to create anything fancy, formatting will be minimal, and you won't need to wrestle with containers.

This video show you how to create it in only 3 minutes!

Need to change a datasource but don't want to rebuild the workbook? Has a field name changed? 

It can be a real pain to update each sheet in a workbook one by one. 

Conveniently, Tableau allows you to change the entire datasource with the "Replace Datasource" option.

Or, if you only need to change a field, Tableau has an option called "Replace References" that allows you to swap one field out for another all in one shot. 

In this example, I take you through the whole process. 

You could also apply this method when you simply want to swap out all existences of one field for another. 

For example, you want to change all used of Order Date to Ship Date. 

Easy peasy!

In this video, I show you how to build a 9-box matrix. 

These are commonly used in talent management and HR to map a company's workforce along two dimensions, potential and performance. 

Each of these two dimensions is split up into three categories, low, medium, and high, depending on the score. 

For each employee performance is then plotted horizontally and potential is plotted vertically. From there, we summarize the number of employees that fall within each box.