CODEWITHSUNDEEP
tableau-api
data_apprentice
data_apprentice

Reputation: 3

Making a Histogram in Tableau

I work for a software company, and I am working with a database that tracks certain events that occur in one of our games. Every time one of the tracked events occurs, a text entry in the “Event Type” field specifies what kind of event it is – “User Login,” “Enemy Killed,” “Player Death,” etc. Another field, “Session ID,” assigns a unique ID number to each individual game session. So if a user logs in to the game, kills eight enemies, and then logs out again, each of those Enemy Killed events will have the same Session ID.

I’m trying to make a histogram showing the number of sessions that have x number of Enemy Killed events. How do I go about this? I’m a raw beginner at Tableau, so if you can dumb down your answer to the explain-like-I’m-five level that would be great.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1754

Answers (2)

Inox
Inox

Reputation: 2275

Tableau 9.0 has been launched, and your problem can be solved entirely inside Tableau.

What you need is to understand the Level of Detail calculations. It will look like this:

{ FIXED [Session ID] : COUNT( IF [Event Type] = 'Enemy Killed'
                                 THEN 1
                              END )
}

This will calculated how many kills each session had. You can create BINS with this field, and count how many sessions there are (COUNTD([Session ID]))

Upvotes: 1

Inox
Inox

Reputation: 2275

Well, my answer will echo with many of my last answers. Your database is not ready to do that analysis.

Basically what your database should look like is:

SessionId   EnemiesKilled
1234        13

So you could create a histogram on EnemiesKilled.

To do the histograms, you can create BINs (right click on field, Create Bins), but I find it very limited, as it only creates BINS of the same width. What I usually do is a bunch of IF and ELSEIF to manually create the BINs, to better suit my purposes.

To convert your db to the format I explained, it's better if you can manipulate it outside Tableau and connect to it directly. If it's SQL, a GROUPBY Session ID, and COUNT of EnemyKilled Events should work (not exactly like this but that's the idea).

To do it on Tableau, you can drag SessionId (to either Marks or Rows, for this purpose of creating a table I usually put everything on Marks and choose Bar chart, so Tableau won't waste time plotting anything) and a calculated field like:

SUM(
IF EventType = "Enemy Killed"
THEN 1
ELSE 0
END
)

Then export the data to a csv or mdb and then connect to it

Upvotes: 0

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