How to Add a Placeholder to Your Tableau Data Source
This method explains how to connect Placeholder data, giving you more flexibility—similar to Excel—and enabling a broader range of visualizations.
Tableau offers a lot more flexibility than other BI tools, but it can still be tricky to replicate the variety of grid chart (table) formatting options you get in Excel.
This post will walk you through a basic setup to help overcome this limitation, and later, I'll cover how to build different visualizations using this approach.
Step-by-Step: Adding Placeholder
- Create the Placeholder.csv file using Excel.
- Add a Text file connection to your existing data source and link the Placeholder.csv file you created.
- Drag a table to the canvas.
- Use the condition
1=1, which is always true, to set up the relationship.
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Creating this always-true relationship allows you to use data from both sources without any restrictions.