50 Tips in 50 Minutes Tableau Customer Conference 2016

so thanks for having us today so this session is called 50 tips in 50 minutes we're hoping you get to about 70 that's our goal how many of you are going to try to follow along and take notes okay don't bother because you will not be able to keep up just close your laptop's enjoy the show watch it on a recording so I'm Andy this is Jeff obviously he's honest he's on a stool to make himself feel taller what was the other thing we're going to say oh thank you to our score keepers up here Sarah and Lorna so what they're going to do is every time they see a tip they're going to flip the chart so that we can keep track of how many tips we have along the way if you guys see something you didn't know along the way that they don't keep score for just clap or shout out or yell whatever you want to do let them know that they should be counting that so there's lots of things when we were rehearsing this with Andy grave he told us we were actually doing a lot of things he didn't know along the way not thinking that it was a tip so if you learned something shout out set it on your mark no you got to go to the next oh yes the right way so the way that this is going to work is I'm going to show you how to do things the right way and Jeff is going to show you how to do things the better way so you'll kind of hear some back and forth here but anyway and by the way the postcard project is long done so we're very glad that's over yeah Jeff knows enough disturbing facts about me now okay so I need somebody Eva you're in charge to shout out when there's ten minutes left just get up and scream when there's ten minutes left and then five minutes so we have a warning and then also when time's up just get up and tell us to stop okay and we're just going to stop wherever we are so Jeff is going to go first I'm going to go first and I'm just going to start with something basic that I don't see a lot which is colored tabs you'll see that I'm using lots of colored tabs for these tips so I thought I would just start off and show you and it's a great use you can't do other customized colors in the XML or anything but you can change colors of the tabs the other one I want to show you is how to bring in data quickly so what I want to do here is I'm just going to find a spreadsheet on my laptop here and I'll just pick one let's just take the copy and paste fruit I'm just going to drag that right onto the canvas you can drag that anyplace in tableau you can drag it on your canvas once you have a viz up you can drag it on the input data screen so easy way to get the data into tableau quick and fast one next I want to show you when you're actually viewing data it gives you 10,000 by default and so I'm going to go with the coffee chain data here and right there's a button for view data and it gives you 10,000 rows by default now this data set only has 42 48 so it's going to give you all of them but if you go to the world indicators and we use the world indicators data we'll see that there's there's 2700 I can pick a hundred in there I can type 100 I can type 2,000 I can type 50,000 or 60,000 and get that data all of that I'm sure you know is sortable but you can also copy data out of here you can copy click in the corner of the data set and you can get all of your data with a ctrl C you can copy that data you can actually open it up in Excel and you can paste that data and you have the world indicators right back and forth so you can drag it in and you can copy right back out and that's handy for at least small data sets let's move on and want to show you copying chart data to excel you can actually do that too so I'll just get a just going to grab a random chart here and right clicking on that you can copy here where it says crosstab and data you can copy that you could also hit ctrl C right from that screen just a ctrl C in you can get the data right for the specific chart that you're in so you can get data in and out very very get minus points for using Excel what would you like me to use I can use email ok so then let's go to a couple quick formatting tips I don't like access lines everywhere and the new tableau 10 formatting is beautiful right it has much Andy even said you don't even need some of these formatting tips anymore but sometimes you need to do some fun formatting tips so for example if you just want to create you don't want borders around your charts and you just want to create an access line your borders are there and your access line is there under access rulers you can create an access ruler that will let you have an access ruler around the whole chart so I'll make this really big so we can see it on the screen but now you just have an X and Y black line and don't have the other lines that are on the chart and along those same lines we can do that on a zero in a zero I don't want the x and y access lines so I will get rid of them in this case and maybe add a zero line on the sheet and put it down I'll make it red maybe for the middle make it really big so you can see it but now we can have a zero line the same way and have more clean clean charts now moving on to a dashboard I call this the better way dashboard instead of the right way dashboard showing the right way sometimes you may want to add a line there's no object for just adding a line across your dashboard and so you'll see up here I have a line that I put under that's not an underline in the text box the text box is actually clean and there's there's nothing there but there is a line underneath that object it's right here I can click on it there not that and that is a text box with color and so what we do on that is is just add I'll just add another one how about we do that let's just go out here to the dashboard we'll add a blank floating text box and we'll just put it right in the middle of our sheet and we'll just leave it blank and then we're going to color it and that's how we get the color of our lines so under formatting text objects we can color that line to anything we want and because it's a floating object we can create we can control how thick or thin that line is and we can move that line anywhere on our dashboard canvas to get really precise about your measurements for that that's under your Layout tab and you'll see a height and you can take that height all the way down you can make it three and you make a really really thin line so you can put a just a blank text box basically and you can put a line on your dashboard to separate anything you want to separate all right and with let's see access lines within line formula I have two more sorry so bar chart here let me go to that dashboard and one of the things that a lot of my students at the University of Cincinnati for us how to rotate that text sales is horizontal and there is no way to really rotate that text in tableau so the easiest way to do that is to just go right up here you can do an inline formula you can just type right in the line right where you want to do it so right where sales are just go in here and type sales just type the word sales in quotes hit enter and you have the word sales that's now right there in horizontal text you can double click your access for a quick way to get to your access and delete the word sales and now you have an access that isn't rotated very simple oh they like that one okay that was better than a golfclap - there has been let's see here reusing charts so unfortunately when you're building a dashboard let's go to the better way dashboard over here that's just fine my dashboard you'll see in your dashboard window that you have a whole bunch of charts listed but unfortunately they don't give you the charts that you're already using when you go to a new dashboard so you'll see I'm using bar chart mat bar chart map and sales by time and so if I want to go to a new map I don't have those options they're not there the easiest way to do that is to duplicate your dashboard just go right click and click duplicate your sheet you'll get a new dashboard and it's using the same sheets that your old dashboard was using even though they're not available to you you still have an option to do that then you can format your new dashboard any way you want to format your new dashboard last but not least aligning to grid and floating objects so I have two bar charts here that are floating and I want to align them and I want to get them very precise and so in this case I'm going to do the exact same thing that I did on that line that I added to the dashboard I'm going to do it under there where I can control the height and B width I can also control the X&Y so where I was controlling the height of that object now I'm going to control the Y placement and so consumers is at Y 229 if I want corporate I can go up here and put that at 229 and I can get it exactly lined up where I want so that I have a perfect horizontal also with the X I think my dashboard lay out is goes to about a thousand here we can take the X we can actually put it at 1200 you can even put it off the canvas completely in the grey area and it's off to the side great place for filters or navigation so that could be a useful tip and designing to a grid which is what I was doing there sometimes you want to design to a grid with your dashboard so I'm going to go back here to go back to my dashboard and I want to just I want to move my things in a my objects here my sheets into a grid and so a quick and easy way to do that is to create grids that you can put on your dashboard as a image so what I'm going to do is a floating image I'm going to put my floating image right across the whole dashboard so I'm going to put it up here and I have pre-built grids so let's say I want to do a 2x2 grid I'm going to put a 2x2 grid on there and I'm going to just cover my whole dashboard so that it covers everything and then I have a grid that I can work with now when you do that make sure that you Center your grid so that it's centered to your image but now the problem is is I have a floating object above my dashboard so how do I move things around behind the floating object that's on top and so what you can do is in your objects pane you can go down and you can find all of your objects for example the map prophet by state and I can size that and I can move it right down to my grid and design to a grid so I can design my whole dashboard with a nice grid and with that I'm going to turn it over to Andy alright good job Jeff and he's kicking my ass what is what's the score 20 20 Jesus all right I don't think I'm going to win all right so this is a tip that I learned from Molly Monte when I did train the trainer training it's hard to say but if you had a sometimes you'll receive a dashboard that's really gigantic because somebody designed it for their own screen if you're ever unsure what size to create the dashboard the easiest way to get it to fit the right size is to quickly change under here under the size menu is change it from fixed size to automatic and then back to fixed and then when you view it you'll get a perfectly sized dashboard so that's tip number one the second one so like you guys might have not noticed what Jeff did there but if you hold your Shift key down you notice I have tiled selected down here on the bottom control and scroll that got tiled selected and I want to float an image so this particular dashboard this is for a senior sales executive and he likes having his picture on the upper right corner because he's just loves himself so I'm going to hold the shift key down and I'm going to drag an image out and you'll see it drags it in as a floating image so I'm going to stick it up here in the upper right corner and I'm going to search for that guy and then I'm going to resize it and put it up here in the corner so this is Jeff's favorite dashboard so we want to make sure that he sees that up there okay sometimes you'll receive a worksheet that looks like this has anybody seen anything like this you know you've got your everybody's got their favorite fonts times new rot comics ons things like that but maybe maybe we actually really like this cursive here that's in the middle but we don't like this really bold ugly thing for our categories so I'm going to right-click on those and choose format and the tip here is if I go into the pane see the same thing happened last time oh there it is okay so if you look under here under the worksheet you see how that is in bold whenever you're in the format met whenever you're in the format pane and you see something in bold that means it's not the default so you can just click on that right click on it and choose clear and it'll get rid of all of those so anytime you go ahead letter yeah let's see it yeah okay so you'll also notice that there's this weird gray band in the middle here so I can go to my banding and same thing here you see my pain is bold I'm going to just clear that clear the header clear the level and there you go it starts to reset the dashboard so you can anytime you see something bold you can change it I'm going to sneak in his tip because I asked him for a tip the guy over there in the corner butcher named Marc Marquez had to do a bar chart inside of a bar chart and Jeff told me I wasn't allowed to do anything on the fly but I'm not going to listen to Jeff so I'm going to look at let's say superstore sales and we just want to do maybe 2015 vs. 2014 does that work for you okay so I'm going to just look at maybe just customer segments I've got my 2015 sales and I want to do a bar inside of a bar so I'm going to take 2014 sales and I'm going to drop it on top of this axis to do a combined X or I'm sorry yeah that does it combined axis move measure names to color that stack some go up to stack marks turn them off and then I need to duplicate measure names on to the size shelf and there we go we have a bar inside of a bar something like that now these look like they're in reverse order so I probably want 2015 as the skinny bar inside of 2014 so I'm going to just rearrange them like that and there you go so that's another tip you're counting all these Sarah right okay I got to catch up all right so here's another one so this is my this is a product dashboard it's just order quantity buy different product types and there's a couple of them that don't look quite right we've got Paul Chapman and bulb the noob in here and we know that those names aren't right but we're not sure how to reset those so I'm going to go under to this product aliases here and I'm going to choose my aliases and you'll notice anything that doesn't have the original name has a star here in this middle section I could clear them all by clicking clear aliases but I don't want to do that the only one I really want to change his bulb the noob so I'm going to double I'm just going to click in that cell hit delete hit enter and okay and it resets that one back to the default so easy way to clean up aliases if you ever are unsure how those got the way they did um all right we've all seen scatter plots like this so people love their trend lines and love all the multiple colors and things like that I guess first I could show you when you have multiple colors you can edit your trend line and uh Nick the allow trend line / color to reduce it to a single trend line but a really neat way to remove a trend line there's several ways you could do it you could right-click and untick show trend lines I don't really like doing it that way so I'm just going to drag it off instead so that's a neat little one learn that one the other day all right so multiple colors so in this case we want to basically create quadrants for things that are in the upper left upper right so on and so forth so if I can remember we've got I've got two measures here so let me just show you this first one here I'm just going to color code my discounts whether they're high or low so if I drag that onto the color shelf you'll see you know they're just two colors one side or the other but I also want to color code based on profit ratio colors so I could create one calculation that has all four of them but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag profit ratio color to the detail and then I'm going to click on this little button here and I'm going to choose color and now we've got four colors and we can see you can add as many things as you want to this so all right okay so calendars are a fantastic way to learn how to use date parts so I'm going to show you how to quickly build a calendar in tableau so calendars typically have weekdays going left to right so on a PC if you right click and drag the date on a Mac you use the Alt command and drag that to the column shelf I'm going to pick my weekdays and then I'm going to go ahead and put in my rows I'm going to put my week numbers and we get the markings of a counter I've already pre filtered this to December and let's say I want to just color this by profit ratio so now we get a quick calendar like that but what I really want is the day numbers on there as well so I'm going to right click and drag order dates to the label and go my day number and it switches my view but that's okay I'm just going to switch it back to squares and maybe add little white borders on them because I like to be able to see kind of the and then I'm going to format my dates so they're on the upper right from there I'm just going to click on this and uh Nick show header because I don't really want to see the week numbers so really quick laid to build a calendar okay where am I here alright so now that I have that calendar when I hover over you'll see I've got a mess of a tooltip so I used to always just go into the tooltip and just manually start to delete things but Carl Walton showed me one day that I can actually just go in here and on any field you can just untick include until tip so I'm going to uncheck all of these because I don't want those in my tooltip what am I left with just my order date and my profit ratio super quick way to clean up your tooltips I really like that one okay now since I changed the order a little bit since Jeff told Joan how much I like sweets I figured I should show you how to build a donut chart so to do this I'm going to just double click on the rows and I'm just going to create a field that is the average of zero anybody know that the average of zero is it's generally zero okay so I've got that I'm going to go ahead and go to that shelf then and make it a pie because I like pie as well and then I'm going to drag measure names I'm sorry measure values to the angle and let's go ahead and flip this so this is looking at the data schoolers and where they sit because I track where they sit I'm creepy like that and I'm going to go and then I'm going to duplicate that field I don't know if you guys saw how I did that you hold your command key down and you can duplicate the field it gives me two pies and then this one I'm going to actually switch to a circle get rid of measure names get rid of measure values and then dual access them don't remember to synchronize when you create dual axis go to your pie and make the pie a little bit bigger alright and then on my average I'm going to just make this one white and then I can go ahead and stick their name on the label if I want and maybe Center align these I'm not going to worry about the formatting too much so that's a quick way to build a donut chart and then I would probably go ahead and hide these headers so now we have a nice little donuts but one of the really fun things to do now that I have a doughnut chart I've got something like this I might not want their names in the middle I may want their pictures in the middle that would be more fun wouldn't it so I'm going to go ahead and remove the labels and let's just get rid of that and I'm going to room I'm going to change this to shape and I'm going to go ahead and put the name on the shape shelf and there we go we have their pictures inside of that and we can see how many donuts are I'm sorry where they kept this is how many donuts they eat or where they sit I don't remember but they a lot of donuts all right so the last one I want to show you in this section is how to sort marks on a map so in this particular map I want to be able to bring the outliers to the front so whether it's a dark orange or a dark blue I want those to be in front of all of the ones that are grey so to do that I'm going to just create a calculated field that is the absolute value of profit so I'm just going to do ABS of profit and hit OK and then I'm going to just go ahead and sort my zip codes by the absolute value of profit in descending order and now all of the oranges all of the outliers are in front of everything else so a very simple way to use it for a calculation and I think Jeff is now going to show a better way to do this I think I think yeah I showed you the right way some of those though have to watch in slow motion there I think why did I slow it down all right so I wanted to show you a great way to do sorting Johnathan drummy just posted this not too long ago you could check out his blog on that but a real great way to do that I'm going to duplicate just like Andy did he I'm using my ctrl key on my PC just drag it right next to it so that I have two charts and then like I did in the in line formula for the access name I'm going to double click on that and just put a negative sign in front of it so just put a negative negative sign so now it's going exactly the opposite and then I'm going to take that green pill I'm going to make it discrete so that it'll become blue and that blue pill I'm going to move down in between mean market and product type and when I do that you'll see that the negative sum is sorting my bars and so right now it's sorting based on central and east top-down but if I take that pill and I move it between product type and state then I'm sorting within the next level and so there's a quick way to do a nested sort now that's fun but let's just create two calculated fields for it down here I have a calculated field that I'm going to edit here I'll just show you what the calculation looks like and you'll see if I'm sorting by market in my parameter then I'm going to use the negative sum of sales otherwise I'm just going to use zero and so what that'll do is I have two of those calculations one for market I'll put that between market and product type and I will take the other one sort product type between product type and state and now my parameter will flip the sorting based on now I want to sort okay I think these will be quick so sometimes we want to move the access around on us right now we have 2011 2012 down here at the bottom we want to put it up in the top one way that we can do that is under our analysis tab in table layouts kind of a strange place in advanced there is a box that you may not have seen and there it says show innermost level at the bottom and if you uncheck that box and hit apply all of your access will move up to the top so that's a real quick one you could do that another way which is duplicating the field I have I don't want to do that here I have go back one sorry I have I'm using year of order date so instead of using order date I made a copy of the order date and when I make a copy of the field then I would can have up top and have it on the bottom and when I do that then I can go down here on the bottom and just get rid of show header and I'm allowed to get rid of the header because there are two different bills so it'll leave my header at the top and so that's another way that you can move it around let's do the same thing with a line chart let's move our access over to the right hand side same sort of same roll it really the same concept you're just doing it with a with a green pill now instead of a blue pill so what I'm going to do is duplicate sales drag it right next to itself then I'm going to make it a dual access as Andy said when you make a dual access you always want to synchronize your access otherwise you'll end up in all kinds of strange situations and then I can just change the font color on this particular access to a white and just make it go away and now I can have my access up I did not duplicate I'm sorry I did not want to duplicate that I wanted to use another pill um there you go my first mistake in my tips do I get a deduction for that Andy yeah okay of course he's going to say yes you need to duplicate that pill so moving on let me do single letters on month you can do this with a blue pill or a green pill two different types of dates ones discrete one is continuous so first with a blue pill this is super simple you can right click on the date and under your format you'll go over here to your date right there and it says first letter can't be any easier than that when you go to first letter you get a first letter that's great now if it's a green pill that can be a little bit more problematic so with a green pill what you need to do is do the same thing right click on it format but you're going to get a different formatting window under your dates and it looks like your standard Excel formatting window what you're going to do is go down to custom and in your custom you put five M's one two three four five and the five M's is a single month letter and that will give you a single month on a green pill so you can actually have a single month on a green pill single letter month some knew that okay all right sometimes we don't like where the label is I think this kind of started the thread of tips but if you click on a any label you can actually move the label you can put it anywhere you want you can put the label in the middle of your chart so that's helpful if you're really trying to get you know fine placement of your labels you can move your labels around so if you didn't know that one I was supposed to be one of mine was it yeah okay well it's my point that I lost when you use a green pill sometimes here you'll see I'm using a green pill with the single single letter trick that I just showed you with the 5ms but the problem is is that the data is first of the month so my letter is showing it the first of the month that's right at the beginning of the bar now you know you could fix that in your data but you could also just do a little trick of just adding 15 days to the month and then you can have your letter in the middle of the month and size the bars to where you want your bars and you have your letter in the middle of a month all right Andy showed that you Andy showed one way the right way I guess of putting color on there I'm going to show you a better way of using two colors in this case I'm using category and I'm using ship mode what I can do in this case is I can put both of them on at the same time I should undo my folders here so I can see these so there's my ship mode and my airship mode where is category there up top thank you and I'm going to do ship mode and I'm going to hold down my control key with category two pills and I'm going to drag two pills on color and guess what I can get two pills on color maybe ship mode and category let's do that again on color why is that not working it does work oh wait a minute I have this box up here that box is getting in my way isn't it let's try that again he's doing this so I have less time all right well I'll move on then how about that dear unicorn unicode characters how many use unicode characters not too many okay look all the things that everything up there there is no shape there is no custom shape on that page that is all unicode characters those are all text boxes and in the text box if you click on it you can copy and paste these just ctrl C these are Unicode characters and Andy's going to show you a website the right website I guess I have a PDF document that I'll link to in this for you but I'm just going to show you some ways that you can use it you can use it anywhere that you use text and so I just did a couple examples for you here's profit is bad with an x mark on it here's profit is good with a check mark on it Andy you can make a Mother's Day card if you want to so you could do that and then even take a one let's just take this one right here I'm going to copy this one into my clipboard ctrl C and go over here and I can I can actually put that in a even in a name furniture cohort I will rename it and just put a Unicode character right in the field there so now Unicode character moves up and I have a one right there for my field name so alright and then last feel free to stop at some point I will making a change to a sheet we've all made changes to something I'm looking at sales I built this sheet and I want to put profit on it now I have profit on it and then I realized oh I wanted my other sheet and I want this sheet how many people have done that I want both sheets so before you start hitting the back button what you should do is just copy your sheet go down to the bottom copy your sheet and then start hitting your back button go back to where you had sales and then you can paste your sheet and you'll have both sheets go down here and just click paste sheet and you'll have your old sheet and your new sheet right next to each other one with sales one with profit and it has a copy of it so there you go turn it back over to you good stuff okay let's see where we are here so Jeff was showing you unicode and i'll show you the website that I use I'll tweet this out but basically this this I don't even how to say the website name so if anybody would like to translate that'd be great but you can come in here and there's tons and tons and tons of different unicode shapes so the way that one of the ways I like to use them is I like to copy the little bullet and when I'm designing something for mobile I'll go ahead and just paste these in here let me just paste in a couple different bullets in there and then I'll format my story and make the Navigator let's make these like 14 maybe something like that turn off my shading make them a little bit smaller come on stinker there we go and then when you design something for mobile so I can go ahead well I can't really design this for mobile because it's story points but let's go ahead and make it like 325 with something like that when you view it this would be kind of similar to doing a mobile demo you just have these nice little bullets across the top so it makes its really great for touch for mobile credit for that one goes to so few sparks okay so sometimes what I like to do if I turn on my labels you'll see they're on the ends on the outsides of the bar sometimes I like them to be just on the inside of the bar instead so let me undo that and I'm going to go ahead and duplicate my sales field but this one I'm going to first make a dual axis and you'll see that makes them both dots so I'm going to go over here to my marks card make the first one a bar make the second one a Gantt bar alright doesn't really matter I'll make it again bar for now and then I need to make did I synchronize that did not synchronize okay and then on my second shelf I'm going to go ahead and drag sales to the labels and you'll see it sticks on the outside but what I can do now is I can align these to the left and then go ahead and make them white now you'll notice that because I use Gantt bars it throws the axis over there too shows me a negative so I'm just going to go ahead and fix the start to zero and put the end as automatic and there you go now you have labels on the inside ends of your bars alright so Jeff showed you something similar before for sorting I'm going to show you a different way to do it so I might want to look at I might want to sort this bar chart by a percent of total profit so I'm going to right click on profit and go to quick table and make it a percent of total and it doesn't look like anything change but it actually did and then I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this field make it discrete I don't know if I'm going to get credit for this one Jeff and then I'm going to go ahead and throw that there and now we have there in descending order I'm sorry they're in ascending order but if I want them to be in descending order I'm just going to double click on this field and throw a negative in front of the whole thing and that'll switch it back to a green pill but that's fine I'll just switch it back to discrete move that to the left and there you have descending so very easy way to use because you can't sort by table calyx so if you want to sort by a table calc you have to do it that way ok this is a pretty fun one let's say that a lot of times what I want to do is I want to go ahead and zoom in on an axis so I'll uncheck that include zero and that lets you zoom in but maybe I want the user to be able to choose whether they zoom or not so I'm going to go ahead and create a parameter and I'm just going to call it zoom and let's just put really complicated things that say yes and no so do I want to zoom I'm going to go ahead and show that parameter control and then I'm going to create a calculated field and I'll call it a zoom value I'm going to say if zoom equals yes then zero oh and notice I didn't put a else in there you'll see why in a minute so I've got this field called zoom value I'm just going to stick that in detail then I go to my analytics pane and I'm going to throw a reference line on here for the average orchard quantity order quantity and I'm going to set it based on my zoom value I'm going to make it transparent and turn off recalc and oops I need to also let me edit that again turn off the label hit okay and because I said to zoom I think I've got it backwards I've got my yes - no backwards but you get the idea so when I choose to I got to fix that because that will irritate the crap out of me so let's say new okay there we go so now when they say don't zoom you see you just it includes the zero on the axis if I choose zoom it zooms in so really cool way to allow your users to zoom in and out okay so sometimes you want to create a diverging bar chart some people call it a bikini chart you'll see why in a second so I'm going to do that I'm going to just going to take this is looking at the population population in Bermuda from 1911 all the way up to 2010 and I'm going to go ahead and stick the male's over here on there and then I'm going to take female and put that up here as well and you see I've got they're both going the same direction I'm going to go ahead and put measure names on colors so they're different colors and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to know I don't women are not negative I'll make the men negative that was a good strategy there wasn't it no way yeah no smile look almost tripped up there for the women so now you can see we've got a diverging bar chart but one of the problems is we see these negatives so I'm going to go ahead and double click on this axis and first off I'm going to remove the labels from both of these and then I'm going to format this axis and I'm going to go to my scale I'm going to first set it to custom number because I can never remember how to do this go to custom and then I'm going to copy that put a semicolon and then paste it and you see I get all positive numbers now going both directions so they don't have K's but I could fix that I just don't feel like it so that's a easy way to create a diverging bar chart or kind of looks if I turned it upside down let me sort this in the opposite direction sort descending there you go that looks like a bikini so that that's not a tip doesn't count all right so Jeff showed you access to the top and I don't remember what this tip was for I really I'd really like to see my axis at the top of my charge okay so we will skip that one because I don't remember what that one is so I'm going to go ahead and now I'm going to create a DNA chart or sometimes it's called a barbell chart and all I want to look at is maybe for each of the last two seasons how a team did so actually let's do goals four and then goals against that might be easier so I'm going to take goals for and drop that on to the columns take goals against and and put that on the same access to give me a shared access view I'm going to take measure names and move that to color make them circles and then I'm going to go ahead and duplicate my measure values and then make a dual axis so you notice I'm doing different ways to do dual axis because I'm hoping I get extra tips but and then I'm going to make this one a line and you'll see my line goes all batshit crazy now so I'm going to take measure names and move that to the path shelf and now you have a DNA chart move those to the back and you're done all right so similar to a DNA chart is a slope graph so in this case I want to look at maybe how a team did over the last two seasons and I think I do have season filtered already so let's go ahead and take season and put that in the columns and let's take their points totals and put that in the rows and when I put the team name on to detail you'll see it just divides up my chart well I'm going to go ahead and make these lines and now you automatically have a oh and if you do control command and right key you can take the visitor so credit there yeah and I'm going to click on the color shelf and throw little dots on the end and that's how you do a DNA chart I'm sorry slope graph alright so now what I want to do is I want to color this slope graph so how did I do this okay so I created a set has weather team has more points or less so I'm just going to drag that to color and now we've got multiple we can we can highlight just the teams that have improved versus a previous season I can go ahead and turn my labels on and I like my labels to match my mark color so I'm going to do that and then I'm going to go ahead and make these a little bit smaller so you get something like that now like Jeff showed you there's some overlapping here so I'm going to go ahead and allow my overlaps and then I can rearrange these like Jeff did as well so I can just make them nice and neat right next to the numbers so something like that okay so I don't get credit for that because you think that's not ready yeah maybe we should both get half a point key rip one of those in half so a specific mark label so in this case what I might want to do is only show the mark labels for some of the marks so there's two different ways you can do this the first way is I could go ahead and hide my mark labels just by I'm ticking that and let's say that I want to show just the green ones so I'm going to highlight just the green circles and I'll do just the ones on the end for now and I can then when I hover right click on one of those I can do mark label always show and now I have the labels for just those four points so that's a pretty neat one you like that golf golf clap another way to do that is through a calculation so I'm just going to create a calculated field I'm going to say points to show I'm going to say if more points then points and so that's going to return a null if it's fails so I'm going to do points to show put that on color up want wall on to label and now you see I only get them on the green lines then so you can use a set in a calculation to do that for you all right and the last one and this in this section is to create vertical lines in your slope graphs so sometimes I'll like to have a line that kind of drawls and connects all these dots together so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and make my season let's see I wanted to make this no I'm failing here miserably sugar snacks forget how to do this okay I'm going to go ahead and duplicate points I'm going to see if I can figure this out on the fly so I've got points I'm going to take that off take that off and that's the wrong field so I'm going to remove that because I screwed up and I'm just going to call this zero the average of zero and if this doesn't work I will concede that I did it wrong but I'm going to go to my average of zero and make this a bar and then I need to size it and I did this wrong so we will skip that one and go on I will I will take a negative for that one Jeff all right all right come back and pick it up because that's what I'm good I drew a blank well I had so I pressure on my left here and I couldn't drag pills so I'm gonna go back and pick that up where I had ship mode how much time we've left oh ten minutes and minutes in 20secs if thank you very much alright so if you recall what I was doing before was gonna do ship mode and category I take both of those pills and highlight them and drag them onto color I'll have two blue pills on color now now that kind of looks funny because that's not the color that I'm looking for so what I'm going to do is bring I'm just going to drag the one pill ahead of the other pill that didn't work let's do that again make sure I drag one down or one up and now I have a light to dark by ship mode and I have the categorical color by the category so blue shipping and so on there and now we're going to get fast because we've been going so slow so you can drag the access to color go down here to my x-axis and I can put it on color there's a quick way to get color I just moved quantity to color you can do that on any axis you could do that on your y-axis or our x-axis I could take category over here and I could put category on color I could just drag it just like dragging a pill so there's a fast way to do color for you another one this came up in my office actually we're trying to do a dual color area chart where you have one color above the zero line and one below the zero line and that's actually harder than it looks because when you do it it comes out with a funky color like here is a line chart example where because it's a green pill that you have on your color it goes from orange to blue it can it moves as it goes across the line not above zero or below zero and so the way to do this is to create a dual access you'll see that I have Prophet up there twice so we take profit we put profit up there a second time and by having profit up there a second time I get a dual access I can create a dual access and I can change the color of one for example I could create the bottom one here and then when I put them on a dual access I can adjust the access right-click here and edit my access I can have one start below zero and stop at zero there's the bottom and do the same thing on the top where I edit the access and say one starts at zero and goes above zero so there's the top and now we have that that's a good one you just snuck that one in I didn't that was it's been available to see that one before I'm going to jump to some quick mapping tips everybody likes map box uh but I'm going to just finish up here with my last few minutes and then turn it over to Andy so I want to create some minimalistic maps where I don't have all the map layers in tableau and so what I did is just have a bunch of different ones here what we're going to do when we right click nope up on our map we're going to go to map layers and you'll see that we have base here we have our Styles light-dark normal those are all there and we have our various lines that we can put on there well what I'm going to do is a combination of taking off the base and changing the pain color so this is a map without map box this is done with just native maps in tableau what I've done here is you'll see that I took the base off I've added the country-region so that I have the country-region but the trick here is under formatting the maps is under your shading it's your pain shading and so that pain shading controls the color of your map I can have a brown map I could have a gray map I could have a blue map I could have whatever color map so just a great way to to do that um and then we can add gridlines of course because we can control borders and we can control gridlines and this particular one I like this one where we this is this isn't a dual access this is a single access chart here so I just have latitude and longitude on that and what I've done is borders you'll see on even the color is empty here I've done all this with just the formatting so when you go to format you'll see that the shading in the background is done with blue doing with a dual access map if I do I copy longitude we've watched us duplicate fields up here if I do that then I can actually add state borders because with the dual access I get two marks cards so in that case I can put one marks card and I can go in here to color and I can change the color on the one marks card versus the other marks card so that gives me more ability to mess with the states and borders on there and let's see I will finish with one last one we have Andy's been showing you throughout this talk the right way of mapping and so we found an address the right way in Humble Texas that's 302 seven right way humble Texas just a couple hours east of here I think I like this map this is your basic black map in tableau but the problem for me is that the lines are really gray and so using the combination of things that I just showed you what we can do is get a high contrast map which in Cincinnati Ohio I found the better way Road and how did we do that we just did a combination of those things that I just showed you so first what we're going to do is we're going to take off the base we go up to the map and go to the layers and make sure that our base map is off because if our base map is on the whole tableau map is going to show so we have to get rid of the base map we have to make sure our streets are there the other trick is to go up to style and make sure you're using light it's counterintuitive because if you go dark you get the dark lines on the map and you don't get the contrast so you want the dark map with the color using the pain and you want the light style to show the contrast in the roads all right five minutes Andy your last all right good thank you Jeff all right I'm going to skip that one some so Jeff showed you guys how to how to throw a measuring a discrete measure in between here you can also I'm going to go ahead and pick region and customer segments and I'm going to right click and create a combined field and it's called region and customer segment I'm going to stick that one in the middle and then I can go ahead and sort by that field descending by sales and that's another way to get a nested sort so I can uncheck the show header so Jeff's is a little more flexible but this is another way to do it okay this is a pretty fun one so in this case I may want to go ahead and create an area chart so I'm going to go ahead and take my this is a let's switch this to an area chart and you get helps if I pick I did click area didn't I okay there we go so we have an area chart here but one of the things we want to do is I want to pull a line that goes that goes across this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate the pill I'm going to go ahead and make this one a line and maybe make it let's go ahead and make it come on let's go oops sorry wrong wrong one let's just leave it like that what the hell I'm going to go ahead and make that one dual access and synchronize and now you can have a nice line on top of your area chart so why should I tell you laughter huh how'd you make that dual access how did I make it dual axis yeah tip I just write what did how did I do it I don't know never mind you know I have like ten I think I dragged it over to here I think I did it like that okay anyway sometimes you do things without thinking and so Jeff showed you how he likes to do dashboard divide the dividers but I'm going to show you the better way or the right way yeah so I actually like to use images instead so I'm going to go ahead and drag an image in the middle here and I go to my tableau repository and I like to maybe I want to put a thin dashed line in the middle there you go so these are just images I have saved them my computer this works really well for mobile because it helps split up the visualization so now when you're scrolling on a mobile device you could see there's natural breaks in the visualization and help split things up so that's another way to do dashboard dividers one thing that I don't think a lot of people know how to do is how to use boolean calculations so I'm going to show you that real quick what I want to do here is yes we could turn on the highlighter and type in you know Alabama and you can see that get highlighted but that's not really what I want to do that's I think that's cheating so I'm going to go ahead and create a parameter based on my state field so I'm going to right click on state choose create parameter and the great thing about that is it auto populates the whole thing but what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually let's clear that first I'm going to say none because I'm going to show you a bonus tip here and then I'm going to do at come on stinker add from field which data set is this average tuition state and that populates everything and then I'm going to go ahead and show that and now you know my parameter doesn't do anything that's great because I haven't told tableau what to do with it so now I'm going to create a calculated field that's my state highlighter and I'm just going to say my state parameter our state equals state parameter and hit OK and that results in a true/false calculation that's a boolean drag that to my color and then I'm going to reverse those so now the orange one comes to the front maybe I'll make this one a lighter gray so you could see it a little bit better and now as I pick a state you can see it gets highlighted if I pick none then they're all shaded the same color all right another common mistake I see people make is they have something like which customers do we fleece the most here so these are our top 10 customers that we steal the most money from and but I have an action filter set up on this monthly sales so let me go ahead and turn that filter on by clicking the little under if you guys knew that you can click on the little filter the tiniest icon on the planet if you can click it then it works but I might want to know well what are the top what are the top ten customers that I fleece the most in my most recent month so I'm going to go ahead and click on December and look at that my customer list is gone well that's because you're using a top 10 filter so if I go to the sheet what you need to do is because my customer name if I show you this filter you'll see oops sorry wrong thing if I edit the filter you'll see that I have a top 10 filter on here well whenever you have a top or bottom filter all of your other dimensions that are in the filters have to be in context so I'm going to go to my action and there we go now I can go and no matter where I click I will get my top 10 and we are out of time how do we do so gonna tie it didn't end in a tie I hope it didn't yes so 86 tips that's it all right good job thank you and special thanks to our score keepers and special thanks to all of you guys for inspiring us and helping us create these tips so thank you very much

Channel: Jeffrey Shaffer

Views: 120,961

Rating: 4.936842 out of 5

Keywords: Tableau, tips, Tableau Zen Master

Id: boJcT-lerFQ

Length: 52min 37sec (3157 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2016