Managing the presentation of data
1. Managing the presentation of data
Let’s see how to manage data properties in Tableau! In this screencast you’ll learn how to make sure your data is interpreted correctly, not only by Tableau but also by your end users. You’ll learn how to change data types, assign aliases, and leverage the color and formatting default properties. We’ll continue with the orders data from the previous chapter, but we’ll limit it to one year, 2018. On top of that we have added Manufacturing as well. You can see that Product Name appears in both tables. The Manufacturing table has added information on each product’s manufacturer. The first thing I’m going to do is change the data properties of Customer ID. As you can see, Tableau has recognized it as a number value and put it in the Measures section. If we go to the Data Source pane, we can see that this is because the field consists of numeric values. However, this doesn’t make sense for IDs as they would never need to be summed or averaged. Let’s fix that. I can simply turn Customer ID into a Dimension by dragging it from the Measures to the Dimensions section. And I’ll also change the data type from Number to string. There we go. That should ensure that the field can be used in the right way when creating visualizations. Another thing you can do is change the labels that are inside of the data elements. Let's look at Ship Mode for a second, I’ll drag it to Rows. Here you can see the different shipping methods in the data set. Now, what if I wanted to change these labels? Well, you can create aliases and update the labels of these different shipping methods. Let's change First Class to Courier, Same Day to Overnight, Second class to USPS Priority, and Standard Class to USPS Ground. As soon as I hit OK on this, it updates it in the visualization. Note that it doesn't change the source data, and it still has the original data in there. So if at any point you decide that you want to go back to the old aliases, you can simply click this button here. Now, a second thing you could do to manage your data more efficiently, is leverage the default properties functionality. I’m going to change the default colors used for the shipping methods. Right-click on Ship method, and under Default Properties, select Color. Let’s say we want to change Courier to a more urgent color, maybe red. For Overnight I’ll choose orange. Ground will be brown, and USPS Priority will be blue. If we now create a visualization using the Ship Mode field, you’ll see that these colors will be used. So for example, let's go ahead and bring Discount onto the other axis, and change the aggregation to average, since it’s a percentage and it wouldn’t make sense to sum it. Now the bars are representing the average Discount for every ship mode. Let’s also change our sort order. I’m going to drag Ship Mode to Color and now the color of the bars will match the default colors we just chose. You still have the option to change the colors, but this will allow you to have a standardized default. From this point forward, every time ship mode will be applied to a visualization, these will be the colors that are used. Next, we’re going to look at another default property, formatting. I’ll show the labels and as you can see, Discount is shown as a decimal. I want to make sure that it’s displayed as a percentage every time I use it in a visualization. So let’s right-click on Discount over here and go into default properties again. I’ll select Number Format this time instead of Color. Here I’ll tell Tableau to format Discount as a percentage and use 1 decimal position. The visualization updates instantly and this is infinitely more useful and more in line with what people are expecting to see. Also note that Tableau offers some great choices inside of default properties for date formatting So those were two ways of changing the default properties. We’ll look at another one later in this chapter. As you can see, default properties are very valuable. Editing the default properties is so important, because it gives Tableau a clue as to how to use your data better and will save you tons of time in the long run. Your turn!2. Let's practice!
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