Using #Tableau Buckets To Compare Weekday To Weekend Data

Introduction

Whether I’m exploring personal or work-related data, I frequently use a technique that I call “creating Tableau Buckets”.

Whenever I have to group items together in some fashion, I usually just create a bucket with a calculated field.  I have written a few blog posts about different types of buckets in the past, but this weekend I created a new type of bucket that you might find useful. I call this the “Weekend vs Weekday” bucket.  As you might guess from the name of the bucket, this will place data that occurred on Sat/Sun in the “Weekend” bucket and Mon-Fri data in the “Weekday” bucket.   This is accomplished with a simple formulation  that is shown below, followed by a short video showing its usage.

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The Formula

Given any data that has a date field connected to it, you can place the data into the “Weekend or Weekday” bucket by using this formula:

// Weekend or Weekday Bucket, Ken Black, November 18, 2013
// This bucket is used to aggregate items based on the day of the week.
// If the item occurred on Sat/Sun, it goes into the Weekend bucket.
// If the item occurred on Mon-Fri, it goes into the Weekday bucket.
//
// Simple and clean if then else structure using Datepart command.
//
if(DATEPart('weekday',[Date])=1) then 'Weekend' //Sunday
elseif(DATEPart('weekday',[Date])=2) then 'Weekday' //Monday
elseif(DATEPart('weekday',[Date])=3) then 'Weekday' //Tuesday
elseif(DATEPart('weekday',[Date])=4) then 'Weekday' //Wednesday
elseif(DATEPart('weekday',[Date])=5) then 'Weekday' //Thursday
elseif(DATEPart('weekday',[Date])=6) then 'Weekday' //Friday
elseif(DATEPart('weekday',[Date])=7) then 'Weekend' //Saturday
end

The Application

Video 1 shows how you can create this type of bucket.  Originally I created this post with information on why I needed this bucket.  I completed the article, published it, only to find out that WordPress somehow saved an earlier version, rather than the final post.  I’ll take that as a message to stop the post now. I’m not going to bore you with the details of why I needed this bucket, but suffice it to say that it is useful if you want to compare what happens during the week to what happens during the weekends.