Recently, I was doing the following workout on Wednesday : https://www.workout-wednesday.com/2026w07tab/
I really enjoyed the challenge! And I learnt something quite interesting! The impact that Tableau's Order of Operations has on both Table calculations and LODs. This challenge helped me solidify why, in some cases, you may want to use LODs over Table calculations and vice versa.
Tableaus' order of operations is as follows:
LODs ( Level of Detail Calculations)
As you can see, for Fixed LODs, they come before dimension filters, so if you want to filter using a dimension before Tableau calculates your Fixed LOD. You have to make sure to convert the dimension filter into a Context filter
Table Calculations
For Table Calculations, they are a bit different as they are computed after the Dimension filter, so if you filter out, for example, the Technology Category, those rows are removed entirely, and thus break the table calculation since you no longer have access to the data needed to retain the same answer. To work around this, you use a Table Calculation Filter. This is a type of filter that occurs after the table calculation and used a function called 'Lookup' to refer back to the ghost table that was essentially created. Retaining the desired calculation output, even when the values for the dimension aren't in the view.
