Groups

1. Groups

Welcome back! It's Lis again and I'll be your instructor for this chapter. We've seen there are many ways to slice and dice your data. So far we've used Filters and Calculated Fields, to slice data and create different points of view. In this chapter, we'll expand our Tableau toolbox and learn about groups, sets, and parameters. Let's begin with groups.

2. What are groups?

Grouping is when you combine related rows in a field. For example, let's say we have a dataset on countries around the world. It has the field country and rows corresponding to different countries. We could group these rows into continents based on their country name, for example. Customize groups to fit your needs, whether it's grouping G20 countries or grouping countries based on their population. The point is to create useful groups or categories not provided by the source data.

3. When to use groups?

There are two main use cases for groups. The first is to create consistency in the data. A common example is different spellings or names referring to the same thing. For example, if we had users input their address and users used different ways to refer to the United States, we can group all of these references together. The second is to provide a new level of aggregation. This fits the last example of grouping countries into continents. Another example is grouping different products into categories like accessories, furniture, clothing, etc.

4. Let's practice!

Alright, now let's add some groups to our Divvy dataset!

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