Easily Calculate Year over Year Growth in Tableau

A quick tutorial on using Tableau’s year over year growth calculation.

Year over year growth is a popular metric for business success. Being able to find where growth may be hindered or lagging is crucial to any business, big or small. Tableau makes this easy with its relatively new addition of the year over year table calculation.

In this example I’ll be using a public dataset on global trade available here : https://catalogue.data.govt.nz/dataset?tags=imports+and+exports. I’ve put the “date” and “country” dimensions in the columns shelf and the “value” measure in my rows shelf to create a simple bar chart. Now we will add a table calculation that shows us the percentage difference from the previous year.

Drag and drop your value measure into the “Label” box, this will label the value amounts over the bars. Now click on measure and select “Quick Table Calculation” and then “Year Over Year Growth” from the drop down menu.

Now you should see the percentage change from the previous year over each of the preceding bars.