Reduced Tableau Features

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Rationale

The VIZYUL™ Reduced Tableau Features best practice rule fires when a dashboard uses a live data connection to a Microsoft Access database.

Insight

So, there’s this thing called a data access library.  The data access library defines how your tableau dashboard accesses the data it uses for the visualizations you create.  Unfortunately data access libraries offer varying degrees of capabilities when used for tableau data connections.

Microsoft Access, Excel and Text file data connections all use the Microsoft Jet database engine data access library.  As of the tableau 8.2 release, using a live connection to a Microsoft Access database disables the following features in tableau.

  1. Tableau 8.1 or prior – Count Distinct (unique count of dimensions or measures), Media and Percentiles are disabled
  2. Tableau 8.2 – Count Distinct (unique count of dimensions or measures)
  3. Tableau 9 – Count Distinct (unique count of dimensions or measures)

Action

If the need arises to use data from Microsoft Access databases, consider creating a tableau data extract by importing the data from Microsoft Access into your Tableau workbook.

Additional Resources

  • http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/accessing-countd
  • http://drawingwithnumbers.artisart.org/i-have-wee-data-microsoft-access-and-tableau/
  • http://community.tableau.com/thread/146010

Microsoft Access Data Connections

  • http://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/online/windows/en-us/examples_access.html