Welcome to blog #2 of my Tableau Data Analyst Exam mini-series. The question we will look into in today's blog focuses in on Moving Averages and how we can utilise them in Tableau Desktop.
If you would like to follow along the questions and data sets used can be found below, within the free Data Analyst exam.)
Crypto takes the spotlight in this question as we look to find the Moving Average for the Average Closing Price for 4 years before 2018 for the Binance Coin Currency (I'm purposely being wordy like the questions!)
Our first step is to set up our analysis by placing YEAR(Order Date) on columns, AVG(Close) on Text, and Filtering our data by Currency, to ensure we are looking at just the Binance - Coin Currency.
As the question states, we want to find the Moving Average. So, the next step is to Turn our AVG(Close) into a MA using Quick Table Calculation.
Next, the question specifies that we only want to see the MA for the 4 years prior to 2018, aka for 2014-2017. This is where things get slightly trickier.
Currently, our default MA Table Calculation is taking an average of the 'prev 2, next 0'. This isn't quite how the question would like us to configure things.
We instead want our MA to look at the Previous 4 Values, which we can alter from within the Calculation Type. However, we aren't quite finished there. We currently have the 'Current Value' box ticked, therefore including 2018 within our MA, which the question specifically asked us to avoid. By unticking the box, we get the following results.
Our 2018 value is taking a MA of the previous 4 years, excluding 2018, and is therefore our answer!
