- Amit Sarda
Generating m*n (and more) Combinations using Tableau
Updated: Dec 21, 2019
Problem Statement
Generate all possible m*n (and more) combinations of codes for Product Range, Items, Cover Variations, Fabric options.
Situation
Let’s say you have multiple lists of codes. The lists look something like this:

You want to generate all possible combinations of items in each of these lists. A few examples of these combinations are:
SONG2STCCCBRO
SONG2STOCCBRO
SONG2STWCCBRO
SONG2STXXCBRO
Challenges
Ideally, I would do this using either MS Access or Power Query in MS Excel. But both these applications work in a Windows-based PC. And if you use a MacBook, you can’t use either of these applications. Besides, not everybody can jump right away to a programming language like Python or R to find a solution to a problem like this.
Solution
You never know what you could do with an amazing tool like Tableau. Import the lists in Tableau and join the lists by adding join calculations.
The following 1-minute video describes this entire process.