In the third installment of the LOD series, we will be looking at the exclude level of detail calculation. This is often a forgotten one because of its limited use case given that fixed LODs can do very similar outputs. This is due to the fact that most Tableau users who are using level of detail calculations, know the level of detail that they would like to go into hence a fixed LOD allows you to do that. With that being said though, there are advanced use cases for exclude LODs so this post will go through of an overview of them.

What is an Exclude LOD?

Unlike the include LOD, the exclude LOD's are a calculation that looks at a lower level of granularity in comparison to the other LOD calculations. However similar to the include calculation, the exclude is affected by most filters in the order of operations of Tableau since it is in the same position as the include LOD.

The syntax for the exclude is as follows:

The example below gives a simple use case of the exclude LOD. Note that this can be done with a fixed calculation though.

The average discount per category is calculated as follows:

{EXCLUDE [Sub-Category]: AVG([Discount])}

And you are then taking the difference from the first and second field to get the result in the final column.

If you want to check out the other parts of the series, click on the links below:

Fixed LOD and Include LOD