Sorting in Tableau

Sorting in Tableau can be perplexing. Sometimes Tableau sorting appears to not work, it may not do as expected. Sometimes the sort doesn’t seem to sort at all, even when you tell it to!

Understand how Tableau sorting works, and remove some of the frustration it can cause!

Someone was complaining recently about the sorting not working in their Tableau table. Actually, the sorting was working, but they didn’t understand how to sort in Tableau. This post should alleviate some of this confusion and demonstrate how to make sorting work.
There are multiple different ways to sort in Tableau, with some taking precedence over others.

It’s possible to sort by a field, to create a manual sorts, to have alphabetical sorts and to have nested sorts. A field on the view can sort the table, as can a default sort setting, and sometimes there’s a sort icon appearing in the worksheet (but it doesn’t always do anything, and it doesn’t always appear!).

[suzhou]

Where do we download the exercise file?