Use the Force for good: Becoming a Tableau Jedi

alright let's go ahead and get started I've got a whole lot of stuff for you today so I'm gonna be breezing through it pretty fast and want to make sure we have enough time to cover as much as I can my name is Mark reader I've been a tableau for over 12 years now I've done this session 10 times but every year I change it these are tips to becoming a tableau Jedi so I'll explain a little bit about what a Jedi is we'll run through a bunch of examples some of them are really tiny some of them are kind of complex and difficult the great news is that this session is being recorded so you can watch it later at your leisure if you want to repeat any of these things also the workbook is going to be published along with that video so you'll have my actual work with everything completed in it as well alright before we jump into that though I'm supposed to remind you that this session is being repeated on Thursday so even though it's being recorded if you want to get that one nugget one more time you're welcome to come back and watch this again all right it's in a different room though so beware of that okay so let's dive right in with what is a tableau Jedi and I think there's three things that you must be a master of to be a Jedi one is obviously the visualization but what does that mean to me if you're a master of mark types and layout then you're a master of visualization now you might still not be building best practice or beautiful things right but you can be able to get your point across using advanced layouts and Mark types understanding the data specifically the level of detail and the data and how to manipulate that using level of detail expressions table calyx aggregations all kinds of exciting things so I have some examples of those in here today as well and finally if your agenda you have to share your insights you have to share things and make people want to come and engage with the stuff that you're building so with that you need to make great interactive content for people to want to click on and consume and use alright so those are kind of my three skills that must be mastered and we'll run through a bunch of different examples today I've structured it a little bit so that there's kind of an easy example and then a hard example and then you can do an easy one so if you're getting a little bogged down with one of the examples just bear with me it'll only last for like five or ten minutes of pain and then we'll come back to something a little bit easier right if you don't like the easy ones same thing just hang on it'll get more complex in a moment so with that let's get out of our little presentation mode here and right and go into our well first of all this is my first Jedi trip I always like to have something quick and easy so even if you're disgusted after this you you come away with something fun how many people know about these little buttons down here right this little guy shows little thumbnails of everything so you can visually see your work and find the sheet that you want to go to and this other one that's one of my favorite hidden things this allows you to to like grab on to a bunch of sheets all at once and drag and drop them to another place I'm not gonna actually do that because that would ruin the the rest of the flow of my presentation but this is a great way to do some bulk manipulations you can rename all your sheets here and do fantastic stuff so we call this the sheet sorter view it's just one of these little buttons down at the bottom alright and now we need to go back just to the tabs so I have more screen real estate and a little bit of a scheduling issue I think you're going to see this feature later on today but some of you may have already used it this is called vision tool tip we've shown it at our keynotes a couple of times and it is now in beta it's part of the diversion 10.5 beta so I'm not going to teach you all the intricacies I'm going to try to give you a couple of tips so when you get that beta and start using it you can build some good high-performance workbooks all right so first of all let's let's do it I just have this simple I'm using all sample data here by the way so that you can leverage this and share it however you see fit so I just have a bar chart showing the birth rates in all the countries in the world right so I'll add a tool tip here just by inserting a sheet I've cleverly named it so it's at the top of my list and we say okay right and that's it now we have a tool tip so when I hover over these right I get a nice little trend you'll see that tableau is warning us down at the bottom I can't move the mouse down there but at the bottom it says view is too large to show this is a common thing that you'll see all the time I would advise you not to make the tool tip bigger by default but rather go to the tool tip sheet and simply set it as fit width or fit height or entire view or whatever it is and then that magically will will scale it for us see now it is all fixed so that's the first little tip the second thing is you may notice that this viz looks kind of ugly right there's tons of different lines on it I would encourage you to do that because this means that if we run this viz we'll have all of the data so that when we look at every single tool tip we won't have to run anymore queries in order to get the data and in fact it's really important that you try and match everything about the VIS in order to make that work so for example here this is color coded by region the region isn't on my tool tip sheet alright so we're gonna be running a query right now every time I mouse over because I don't have region in my result set for that tool tip so there's two ways to fix it one is to change the fields that are being used in the filter on the tool tip which is pretty straightforward or I prefer just to get this to match the the colors over here and everything makes it a little more consistent so I'll just add that and now we're ready to go but this brings up another question for a lot of people well this works great in the demo because I clicked on the tool tip sheet right that query for everything we get that back and then we can easily filter that just in our cache in order to get the results but what happens if I'm on a dashboard right and I send somebody to to the link to this dashboard they come in they run the sheet but they haven't run that tooltip sheet yet so now every time that they mouse over we're gonna be sending a query so that we can get that that result there right if your date is fast which this is that's no big problem if it's slower right it takes a little bit of time the users might be pausing for a little bit in order to get that to catch up so what do we do there's a fun little trick we just take our little tool tip sheet now I'm gonna drag it just to some spot on my dashboard that I'm not too concerned with just gonna make a little floating guy over here alright and this is new in ten five as well I we can size things really small so I can just make it into this kind of non-existent usually it completely disappears not even a little artifact down there all right so now I have this little hidden sheet I know it's there because it it shows up as checked off on my list over here but now when somebody runs this dashboard we're not only going to run the query for the visualization that's there but also for that little base sheet and so we'll have that all in the cache and ready to write and they'll have much much better performance when they're mousing over all the different marks to see the tooltip right so that's the the first little bit about visiting tooltip I hope you guys love this feature Tablo does a lot of things automatically for you with it but there's some things that you could do with formatting even better so I don't know if you saw like the legend automatically was stripped out some of the sizing of things changed it's pretty nice to make it seamless for you i and it also gives us an opportunity to engage people more in visualization right so we have a crosstab very useful display of data but sometimes it's overused all right there could be better ways to show this data but sometimes this is the request this is how people might prefer to see it and hopefully a lot of you whoops clicked on the wrong thing there hopefully a lot of you have started doing things like maybe coloring it a little bit and filling in the background just changing the mark type a little bit there so we get we call this a highlight table you can highlight some exceptions or other things in there that's a good way to get introduced to visualizations but also now you can just put a viz in the tooltip so when they look at that they get some extra detail they see the trend of that particular sitting over time and hopefully they want to engage more with the visualization now this is nice I just built a simple viz and dropped it in there but you can see the formatting of the date axis isn't so good sometimes because the viz is so small you might want to go and adjust things a little bit right I just have a couple of letters with periods next to them that's not super useful alright so let's go and fix that real quick here's my base sheet again I have it bigger than what I want in the in the tool tip itself this has all of the years in all of the categories and sub-categories just so it can be cached but let's go ahead and format this this month field and I'm gonna pick this wonderful capability called first letter right so if you use that notice how it changed the axis at the bottom so that we just have the first letter of the month right and I have this set to fit to the entire view again so it tries to adapt to the tooltip very nicely so now in mio so everything's I get that extra a little bit of context it allows me to see all of the names of the months right just with the first letter so that's a fun little formatting trick for dates all right so we're doing pretty well sorry about the little sniffle there next this is the more complex example densification alright this is something that tableau typically does automatically and there's a couple of cases where you can exploit this to solve all kinds of interesting data problems all right so I'm going to explain densification and why it exists to begin with and then we'll look how to exploit it so that we can do some more interesting things so right now I just have a simple viz right showing some sales over time I and I want to do a table calculation to see the the running total of sales all right so I'm just going to do that quick little table calculation and boom and although this is like a technically correct display of the data it's not what we would want to see for example in this particular period we didn't have any sales and over here we didn't have any sales for some of the regions but I did still expect the running total to continue through those periods right because they're the total that we had sold all before there should still be represented in that particular area but there is no actual data there there is no result set that we got from the the database we call it a tuple or a tupple if you like that there's no row of data for us to plot so tableau will fabricate these extra rows of data for us so that we have information to plot and in fact tableau usually does that by default I've just turned it off so I could show you how to get it on when when we don't turn it on for you and you just go on date fields you have this option to show the missing values and so you can just click on that and boom tableau fills in all those missing records all the missing colors and shows us a plot that we might expect okay so that's dates we do that with all the different date levels fill in those missing values for you the other time that tableau will do this is with bins and again we do this by default but I turned it off so I can show it to you and so here we have things let me just make this bigger I guess I didn't do my tech check properly here I so you can see that we're missing some values the bins are supposed to be in a thousand but we're seeing the 5,000 and 6,000 bin right we're missing the 7,000 bin up there so it's kind of a little bit of a deceptive display of the data so when you use bins in tableau we also have this option to show missing values and then we all put in those blank or empty things so this one's a little bit different right so instead of creating new marks right here we're just creating new labels for you but it's still the same type of concept all right so these are two things the tableau does to create data for us now why might I want to create some extra data well there's lots of advanced displays that people want to build like sainty diagrams for example I'm going to do one with a smooth line that connects through some different points a lot of geographic data sometimes you'll want to be able to create arcs or points from from one point to another point but they're structured the wrong way there's all kinds of things that it's useful to have more rows of data and I see people either duplicating their data lots of times to create these extra rows or joining in a big file that has thousands of things that joined in certain where these are doing cross products but know we can let tableau create the data for us very easily all right so using these two features so the example I'm gonna build is based on a bump chart so this bump chart to shows the rank of something as it changes over time so here I did the sales rank it changes over four years right it's not the most exciting viz but it wouldn't it be great if instead of just these these straight lines everywhere we had I'm just gonna change my little smoothing factor if we had some lines that flowed nice and easy through everything I just find this is a little bit easier to consume and to see some of those differences in magnitude and I think it looks kind of pretty right so in this case I'm using the exact same sample data but I asked Tablo to generate a hundred extra values between my my two points of data that I had right so that says all we're not manipulating the raw data in any way we're just telling Tablo to densify it for us so let's go ahead and build this real quick now some of the calculations I'm not going to type them out because it gets a little bit too complex but I'll show you some of the techniques that work here so the first thing is I need to I need to create a rank right and I've already created this because it's embedded in some other calculations as well but I'll show you what that is this is just using a simple let me hide that simple little table calculation rank I did a unique rank in case there is a tie I and then rank the sum of sales right pretty easy so that's my my table calculation we're just gonna throw that out there on the sheet sales rank and we get one big point right I need to tell the sales rank to compute across my sub categories so that I get the rank vertically for every column based on my sub categories right so there you have it we have our rank of stuff now I need that rank to be calculated at multiple points in time now just for simplicity I'm only going to do this for two points but in the example and the workbook it'll show you how to do it for any number of points that you might be interested in okay so now if I do something like dragged out my order date where that's not supposed to be open there we go order date right you can see I have my 2 years and I have two different ranks well how do I get the rows to fill in now I could just expand my date out and you know change it two months or something like that but now I have a rank for every single month right because I do actually have data points for every month and day by my data so I don't want data to tableau to recalculate it for every single period so I'm gonna do something that is a little bit of a reverse trick and so I I won't use the obvious thing which is the date field instead I'm gonna create a bin to make sure that I don't have data in these particular bins and so I created a simple calculation here which is my year of order date that's just going to extract out for every row of data in that year it's gonna have the same value right just the year number and it also makes it an integer which is really important because we like to bin numbers very well okay so now I'll just create a bin I create bins I figure out a size in this case I want a 100 points of data so I'll make the size of the bin one 100th of a year and click OK and then just drag that onto my sheet and once again we have points at the the beginning oops we need to make this fit there we go points at the beginning and the end but no points in the middle all right this is great I have all the labels I just need to force tableau to densify my data and repeat my sales value my sales rank all the way across the data and so making progress I'm gonna change this to a line display just to show you that it doesn't work right there's no magic thing that connects these together because I don't have any points in the middle to connect them together so let's do that I I'm gonna to kind of step ahead and show you that the we can easily plot something across all that data this is going to be the type of curve that I use its called a sigmoid curve there's lots of other types of functions that you might want to use it's really not that complex but it looks kind of complex so I have some notes in here for you after all but it's just one divided by this exponent right 10 to the whatever and it's based on the index of where I am right in the overall size meaning the number of points that I have and so this allows us to interpolate between zero and one with this wonderful nice smooth curve that would people find looks really nice right so here it is down below right we've automatically filled all that in because there's a table calc working across all of these bins right I you could obviously use different things in there if you wanted to I like this one because it's automatic you could put you could fix the numbers if you want to it might improve performance a little bit but that's a sigmoid curve the equations for those are all online easy to find different ways to adjust them get different slopes if you want to all kinds of great stuff I and then I'm going to use this other function that I created if I can show you it that again maybe looks a little complex at first but it's rather simple it's using a lookup expression which is a table calc that allows me to refer to any value in my my data window and the window can be defined by the dimensions that you have we can set that later if we need to but allows me to look at any value in my data window so in this case the lookup function says find the first sales rank and then add a little offset to that that is the difference between the last write the final sales rank I guess for you it's over on that side the final sales rank right it might as the first sales right so basically we're starting at a point we know there's some offset that we need to get and then we're multiplying that by that sigmoid function so we get this nice smooth flow through everything along the way all right so again rather simple when you understand the power of the detail that you have in your visualization okay so we'll just drag that guy over there my smooth line and boom we've got something pretty exciting it automatically works this is another thing I kind of tricked you a little bit because the way that I added these fields to the sheet and because I set them properly each time added them there both of these fields are used inside this calculation so when I add that that final table calc in there it defaults to using how the other calculations have already been preset for me so I use this all the time when I have complex table calculations because otherwise you're in this this menu here right the Edit table calculation and you're like well which one is which and how are they supposed to be set and it can be hard to figure out which one is impacting your result in which way so instead I just lay out all the base components make sure that they're set properly and then you add the final one in there and it's automatically set the way you want it okay so that's a great little shortcut for for building these functions all right so let's get rid of the ones that I don't want now I don't have to keep them out there the other one said we might just come in here and reverse the axis maybe not include zero we could probably set the tick marks so that they show things and now I can easily see my rank across those two years and see where they're transitioning what's changing place etc okay again in the initial example that I let into I showed that this can this can work across multiple years as well it's also pretty easy to replace the dimension that you have in there which I like so for example if I wanted to do this across states and see the the rank of states right I'll just replace that on the color my table count breaks because it was referring to the prior thing and I just say look at States instead no and of course it broke it worked last time I did that bummer oh I know why I did that I I'm sorry let me undo I was too aggressive I have to go in the Edit table calculation and just changed the sales rank to work across States there we go right and now if I changed the order of these guys we will change the colors very nicely see so pretty easy to adapt to the bass fields that are in here to any type of thing you might be using great so that was the more complex one I couldn't there is more examples in there again in the workbook that were just too much to cover in the the time we had today so let's let's go back to a nice layout trick that I enjoy how many people have built a dashboard something like this where you have a whole bunch of numbers at the top that are just showing you some high level stats and then you have more visualization below yeah it's a very common thing and I see I see some people making great attempts at this some people making not so ideal attempts at this I and I want to show you what I think isn't the best way to approach this all right so the first one which is what's up here is people often build each one as a separate sheet and I do that so that things like this don't need to happen right I can come in here and maybe with a little gesture come on pop-up why won't you let me drag you well this is one of the reasons why I don't think this is a good example because sometimes the layout is can be a pain in the butt I oh I think I set it to distribute evenly as what the thing is all right so I need to get up to this this is why you're not supposed to change things I after you you figure out how to do it right so then you can you can adjust the sizes by dragging but every time you change one right the other one goes a little bit off and then you try that so you're just always fighting this battle of trying to get these things to layout properly it also has the downside that each one of these requires a query to the database so even though we can do queries in parallel this is gonna put was I have six things there right so that's six queries to the database just to get those top level numbers so wouldn't be better if we could use one sheet to do that so a lot of people try that and I've already for the sake of time just tried to pre-filter my measures to the same things but a lot of people will do this right you use measure names which is great put measure values on the text and boom we have one sheet with all of those numbers on it right fantastic except I've got too much space for birthrate right so I'm gonna shrink that now I just shrank everything along the side right so when we use this columnar display tableau always makes all the columns the same size right so sometimes this is gonna work great for you if your measures both the names and the values are similar in size this is a great way to go in fact I mean this one could easily be fixed just by changing this to display in billions instead of million or instead of actual dollars so this is a very valid technique that works in a lot of cases but I'll show you that with just a simple change I'll just drag those measure your names over here to my text shelf just the same notice how tableau lays that out for us automatically right we don't get the nice vertical bars between my my different measures but they're all different sizes right now we automatically put them into nice columns in this layout but each column can have its own unique size right it's also really fun because if I did want to change this to be a vertical display oh it's not gonna let me do it I have to do it on the dashboard I I can get it to actually lay out vertically as well instead of horizontally so let's see what that looks like on our dashboard just grab that measure names and we'll just drop it in there don't worry if it doesn't look quite right again we just tell tableau to fit the width and boom it's laid out if you want more space between these it's actually really nice you can just go in and edit the the text shelf and put some extra spaces in between things so that's pretty easy and of course a little bit of formatting would make it so that they look like better titles there and so that one's that one's quite easy instead of fit width I'm going to take it back to standard and I guess I'll use a little blank guy over here and I just want to make it smaller and say that night see and now we can put them as a list going down as well I'm not certain why it stopped at that particular point there we go there's not enough space to get them all in there right now but we can do vertical layouts very easily just by changing the size of the sheet so using these text layouts can enable all kinds of interesting ways for tableau to layout the data for you you can put as many different fields on there as you want you can type in your own text if you want to so I've seen people do this to create like a sentence of data you know our sales last week we're going and then they put in a field that it says up or down based on on what the data values are right or put in the number you know our customer satisfaction increased by whatever percent the values are there so there's there's some fun things that you can do with this this type of text layout as well okay so hopefully that helps you get more performing better performing dashboards it's a little bit easier for you as the author to lay things out often on these these text layouts rather than building all the different sheets you don't have to compromise the look and feel either okay so that's a nice little dashboard layout trying to see if I'm going oh good good good we're going it at a great pace hopefully you guys are keeping up ok so here's an interaction that I really enjoy and it's kind of revealed in the title so I want to be able to drill when I click on something right so we're gonna build that today so instead of you know right here I can drill but now I drilled down on everything which can be a performance problem right I did drill down on all of the states to the counties and I have to know that I can click there to go back up a level or I could hit undo right but sometimes we get feedback that that's that's challenging for some users they get stuck in a place they don't know how to get back so I'd rather if I click on one of these titles or one of these marks to just keep Georgia right I didn't drill down to show the county for Georgia they make it really easy to get back as well so we're gonna use a whole bunch of different techniques here all strung together to convince tableau to do this for us so the first thing we need to do is create an action right because I need to tell tableau to do something when the user clicks so you create an action it's gonna be a filter action I'm gonna give it a nice clever name like drill and just so other things don't break in my workbook I'm gonna tell this to only work on this particular drill field our sheet right so it's gonna go from this sheet to itself most people don't know that we can have actions that refer to them to their own sheet right you don't have to send them someplace else these self referencing actions are useful like for drilling down a hierarchy if you have a recursive hierarchy you can set these up so you can just keep clicking and drill down down the hierarchy as much as you want useful for little tricks like this as well we're gonna make it run on select we'll go ahead and I'm just gonna I want to explain why yet but I need to leave the filter I well actually I'll just go ahead and leave it at its default and then I need to make this run only when I'm on the state field I would just want it to filter that we're gonna be adding some other fields I don't want to break it along the way okay so a pretty basic set up let's see what it does I click now boom right I've just filtered down to the mark that I clicked on so that's huge progress if I click again right it goes back up right that's because I set it to not leave clear the selection right when the selection is cleared right so kind of fun you can go back and forth real easy so that's step one now we have an action that does something interesting on our sheet but just keeping a single field isn't what we want so we're gonna create another calculation and this one I'm just going to call it a like drill level or something in this case we're going to use a a little if statement and we're gonna use a level of detail expression now a lot of you might think you know the right expression to write in here which is fantastic I'm just gonna default to the right one and then eventually explain to you why this is the correct one so I'm going to a fixed calculation and hopefully it's the right one because I don't actually remember if this is the right one and I'm going to do a count distinct of the states all right so if the count distinct of states equals one then we're going to show the County field and county else we're going to show the state field whoops there we go all right the level of detail expressions I'm not going to go over those in detail today but what they allow us to do is to do a calculation that is at a different level of detail than our visualization is so our typical aggregations take into account all the dimensions on the the viz this one I'm saying just in my overall data set I count the number of states that I have right now this is why most of you think it's wrong because you're like well that's always gonna be more than one right there's always more states in there I'll show you how to fix that and why I had to use a fixed here in just a second all right so let's take that field drop it out there see what it does right it looks correct right now it's showing me state names that I click and nothing exciting happens right it didn't default to one well again that's because there's still many states in my data set so what I can do is take my action and add this to the context so now that that fixed LOD expression is going to operate just on the data that matches my filter right so this is a great little way to manipulate level of detail expressions a lot of you thought I should use in or you affixed at the state level or some other type of thing I can't use an include or exclude expression because those are measures right and I wanted to display the actual dimension value yeah there's some other tricks we could do along the way but I find that this one works the best okay so just add the action to the context now when I click boom right it drilled down I and showed me good stuff all right I click again and I get an unexpected error things could go poorly now I hope thankfully that well we'll see so very nice right I can click yeah now it's done okay that one worked yeah so let's take our state I'm just gonna get it out of the way so it's on the detail right we'll try it again I there we go this is what I was expecting to happen nothing right and the reason that nothing is happening right now and it goes back to how we set up that action because if I click on Florida right now and then we change all the values to be the counties Florida's no longer selected right so it's actually doing the action twice super fast it's doing the action finding that nothing selected and then reversing my action right away it can be very confusing when you encounter this in practice because you're like it's not working but it's actually doing things twice every time I click so that's a quick and easy thing to fix going back into my action edit my little drill there and instead of clearing the selection will show all values we just say that should leave the filter all right so now when I click good it drilled down I click again nothing happens well I can tell the users hit the undo button right that would help out but it should be a little bit better I want it to go back up when I click again so we're gonna trick Pablo here using a dual axis trick again we'll just create a little calculation in here based on obesity rate create a calculated field there uh we're gonna call it tricky so we're gonna say I actually let's go ahead and say okay on that I forgot one other little tip that I was gonna give you here so I want to reuse this part of my expression right I but you know I don't want to remember exactly what it was or if I decide to change it I wanted to change several places I need to use this in the next calculation you can just highlight that drag it over to the data window right and it creates that so I can say one state and now I have my sub expression as a new field that I can reuse wherever I want so this you can drag and drop stuff onto the the shelves if you want to you can drag parts of it out you can do all kinds of fun stuff and so I love doing that just to make those sub expressions very easily alright so now let's go back and edit our are a little tricky calculation and so here we say if there is one state then show the the obesity rate otherwise no well actually this is the reverse of what I might do I wanted to show you two little tips in here one is that I love writing these simple expressions without the else Clause because table will automatically add the else clause for me and I'll put an else null in there for me all right so it's just a little shortcut that you can do but this is reverse logic right so if there's one state in this case I actually want to show null I and if there's counties that I might show the obesity rate okay so in order to fix this my other trick that most people don't seem to to find it's hard to get to if you want the opposite of a logical expression you just put the word not in front of it okay so if not one state meaning multiple states then show this obesity rate okay otherwise there's gonna be a null in there so again fun little shortcuts that you can do in your calculations to get things going so let's add that guy in we'll put it up there notice that it's null let's now I don't know how to get back I usually do this the other way I but I will continue on this needs to be the average and then we're going to say that this should be a dual axis and then we're going to get rid of those extra colors that ended up on my color shelf tableau automatics automatically adds that so now I have a dual axis so I basically have two marks behind each each state right now or I guess these are counties so when I click on this mark that's clearing my selection okay this might be related to that error that we saw oh there we go that's right I okay let me explain that I skipped this step I apologize so I took state I was in the the detail pane for the second one I don't want it there because now there's still a state in each of these marks that I'm clicking on and that keeps my action going right so if I take state out of the level of detail of this second measure then it's not going to be available in the the mark information when I click on it there we go now it's working all right so the level of detail trick is basically to say when I drill down don't display any information about the states right let's get rid of that detail and so there's basically little null records when I click on this for every single value ok so there's actually like let's click again so there's there's null States everywhere here you can see that over here side this little null indicator I you can get rid of that by the way by right-clicking and saying hide oh we have this wonderful little interaction where I can click on any state that I want to it drills down shows me all the counties and then if I just click anywhere again it'll draw back up and I can invest get the next state that I'm interested in right so I used this bar chart because it is a kind of an easy way to show and explain it we had to create actions right that referred to the sheet itself we put that action on the level of detail on the context we created a level of detail expression to count how many of a certain object we're in the the context we wrote a couple of nice calculations to manipulate the display and use the dual access trick too so it looks like they're still marks when there aren't for some things right and now we have just like a fun little drill down of course this one just drills down and then back up I haven't figured out how to make it drill further but this concept is very useful in a lot of places for example I have a map and I want to drill down the details just for Texas boom there's my details for Texas all right I click on something again and oh we're loading the map we got some some slow some slow internet here I guess and we'll just wait maybe and see where it goes so very useful on maps because you can click it drills right in comes back out I and you're able to to see that I think we might be hung which is fine this would be a good spot to try over since we had that error earlier we will just maybe we're more hung than I thought no that's still working all right how are we gonna do this because it won't launch a new tableau for me I think while that one's still running yeah we're gonna have to force quit it oh there it goes it came back but we're gonna we're gonna stop it anyway and try again no don't save please okay so yes this is the beta so it worked great for me doing all this construction and rehearsals of things but things always go crazy all right you're really going to get it now can I force quit from this menu oh yeah yeah thank you I always do it from the icon I don't have that right now yes you really want to quit okay perfect thank you for the assist all right tableau ten five there we go and now we are back up and running and we're in a great spot to show you some other examples all right so I was clicking on a state to drill you saw that one so I'm not going to do it again because who knows what's gonna happen but you can also do some fun things on dashboards using this technique so now instead of drilling to the sheet itself I'm using one sheet as an interface to drill down on other sheets so for example if I come here and click on California then the upper map is going to filter to California right I yeah it's not liking my second clicks all of a sudden and vice-versa you can make it so if you click on a state that'll drill down to counties in the details below and there is a fun little thing I wanted to show you there is I actually made it so that the title changes from all states it'll say showing however many counties from this particular state so that's a fun thing I think it might just be some some sort of Internet issue or something I'm on Wi-Fi though so I thought that would work but we'll we'll give it a second here again all right we won't we'll give up and quit that guy and we'll just launch it and skip to the next example all right yep full screen once more all right yeah we can get rid of you okay so I it should work very nicely for you apparently if you're on the Internet okay so we alright so we're back you know this is supposed to be a smooth bump chart but just pretend like it is it doesn't really matter for this example so the next thing is legends okay so here I have the default legend from tableau but I have a line chart all right wouldn't be nice if there's a little line there or maybe just a little circle would be fun for us to be able to build their tableau doesn't allow us to change the type of icon or the swatch that I use in my color legends it's always the square right no matter what I'm doing so can I build my own legend right that has the look and feel that I want of course the answer is yes because I'm up here asking the question it's a little more complex than it should be but it also allows us to set up some additional interactions because then you can have it's a sheet when we're done and that sheet when you click on it it could filter one sheet and highlight a different sheet right or do a bunch of different types of things so in fact it kind of unlocks a whole bunch of more capabilities for us as well or with visiting tooltip you can actually have a tool tip pop up on your legend right that tells you more information or shows you all kinds of great things so I actually became a bigger fan of this after building a few of these examples than I thought I would so we're gonna start just by building a simple sheet with our subcategories all right we're gonna put subcategories also on color we're gonna tell it that it should be a circle right now a lot of people know tricks here right we might want to put subcategory also on the label and get that to layout but you kind of you see the problem here although this this would work in some cases I've set it to align to the right which it goes fully right I really want it just to be on the right side of the mark and I've been able to get convinced it to do that I did either goes on the other side of the mark are on that side of the mark sometimes it'll be correct for some marks but flipped for other ones like if the word art is shorter and it'll think it'll fit on the other side so you can't really put the text on the same sheet as the display of the the legend mark itself so I'm going to take that off I am going to undo my manual sizing so that's back and small and then I'm simply just going to do one of the tricks we all use is just to not show the header over there so now I have all my my little values and I will duplicate the sheet to create another is that the right sheet yeah to create a copy of this so that I can put my my text on there now I know all of you are really excited because I already taught you that you can come in here and choose text and then tableau will lay it out in very interesting ways and I can say put that subcategory on the text and then we're all happy the problem if you look at it really look how big it is right now how long that list is between those two the problem is we use different layout algorithms for different mark types so trying to get the size of this text layout to match the size of my circle layout legend is challenging all right dudes it's possible all right but you have to manipulate things and I find it's much easier to just keep the the circle mark all right put the text out there which is fine and then simply change the layout of the the text to be on that side okay so this is just you click on the label it you change all the fonts or colors or all kinds of different things in fact I really like a capability we added recently it's not there let me do it again there it is to match the mark color right so now you can have text your labels that are on the end of lines or other things like that match the color of the mark so I really like that one I'm not going to do it right now this can keep it as automatic and then of course we have these extra dots there that we want to get rid of so we're gonna make them small by changing the size and we're going to make them transparent by changing the color or the opacity to zero so now I've just created a little set of labels that I can not put out anywhere that I want so we'll go back to my sheet we're gonna get rid of that I'm gonna add a little horizontal layout container on the side here so I can put my two legend sheets out there side by side all right there's one there's the other and then let's get rid of that let's get rid of our titles if you want a title you can either leave the titles on for both or I just like to put another text field up on top so I can put the the title in I'm just gonna hide the titles for both of these and voila we can shrink that as much as we want to get them next to each other in fact we can now in the the layout we can get rid of all the borders if we want to so outer padding inner padding I need to pick one of the zones there we go alright so it has all this padding around it I could just say make that zero and get them perfectly knocked up against each other if I wanted to this one looks like it has a scroll bar right now which is changing my sizing a little bit I don't know why it has a scroll bar I think I changed the wrong thing there all right there we go make it small get it over there and then all right and then they've always aligned for me before again that's part of the joy of demos oh I padding right so I need to change that on this guy as well thank you I must have done it in there on this one I actually want to keep some of the padding so I'll change just some of them to zero and then we'll be in good shape so I left the lines on so you can see that they actually line up in good ways of course you could format that to get rid of those upper and lower lines and do other things as well but now we have a nice little a legend that we've custom-built again part of the value is you have these tooltips so you could put like a little histogram there to show the distribution of labels you could have different interactions so when you click on this it filters or highlights or changes things lots of fun stuff that you can kind of collapse so you can make it work as your quick filter as well as your legend then all kinds of great things and of course I started out saying what about I wanted to look like a line that's just a little more complex to build but totally you can do the exact same thing it keeps wanting to bring out our color legends right and just create your line and shrink it up whatever you want and get rid of that title so any mark type that you want to be your little color swatch is now possible using just some of those fun layout and some of the new spacing features in intend 5 ok so nice quick win there with the layouts let's go on to our next guy Oh run out of time I will skip this one and go on to the final one so that we can use that instead so this is again a relatively simple one I'll explain the other one I have enough time to do that because the example is in the workbook that you'll be able to download here I have two visits on my dashboard and they both have the same measure but there are different levels of detail but they have different axes so it's kind of hard to compare or to understand these so this technique is to use a reference line and some level of detail calculations so that we can calculate the axis range of both of these from each other and so the reference line will then make it so all the axes line up they lost the mic okay while you filter it'll you can have the choice of whether to have the axes change with a filter or be stuck into the filter as well okay so then my final one this is just a fun little thing that always frustrates me when I use people's top 10 they'll show top ten and maybe some other measures next to it alright so here I have the top 10 countries with internet usage notice that Iceland's up there and Liechtenstein and some fun things like that and then I soar down birthrate and I get in this case I get the same set of countries why is that is it the same set of countries yes it is it should not be the same set of countries I've confused myself now you would think that you know something besides Iceland right would be in the top 10 for birth rates right population total same thing I sort on that where's where's China and India and you know Russia all these other types of places that are big countries so all the sorting is limited to what's in my top 10 right so instead of using that top 10 filter on the country I'm going to create my own little top 10 filter I and I don't know if I wanted I'll just do it here I will call it index and we'll say that the index is less than 11 all right so quick little calculation drop it in there index less than 11 is true so now we're using table calculations to filter my data I warn you like do this when you have a relatively small domain in a result set so like if you have a few thousand things this is probably okay if your country field has millions of things this is not going to be either trick for you okay but for several thousand things it works quite well and so now when I click since we have all that data we're going to sort it and then find the top 10 things in our index and so the list of countries is going to change no matter what field I click on over here so now you can see we have all kinds of different countries for the birth rates a different set of countries for the population totals etc it so I just find this makes top 10 visits a whole lot more consumable for people because the the measures are the the countries change while you click on different right so unfortunately that's about it for today we're pretty much out of time I hope you've enjoyed some of these tricks and have a couple of things that are gonna advance your journey to becoming a tableau Jedi I have to also remind you that there is a survey there we go I'd love it if you completed and gave us some feedback on the session and even I'd love it if you sent some of your own Jedi tricks to me as well all right thank you enjoy the rest of the conference [Applause]

Channel: Tableau Software

Views: 40,295

Rating: 4.9175258 out of 5

Keywords: Visual data, Visual analytics, Business analysis, Business analytics, Business analysis tool, Data analytics tool, Data Analytics, Analytics, Analytics platform, Cloud application, Business analytics platform, data analysis, data visualization, business dashboards, business intelligence, tableau, tableau software, Tips, Best Practices, Advanced Analytics, How-To

Id: d22A4XVoUEs

Length: 57min 20sec (3440 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018