1. Shares, gauges, and KPIs
For this demo, let’s start by looking at two types of visuals that show shares of a whole: pie charts and treemaps. We’ll focus in on data from 2019, setting a filter where the year is 2019. For our first visual, we will add a pie chart of the total sales amount by product name. There were a lot of different products sold in 2019, so it’s hard to see much here with a pie chart.
If we change this to a treemap, it’s a little easier to see relative share sizes, though we need more space to make it clear. Still not great, though.
We can add the total sales amount by enabling data labels on the format menu.
This is an okay use of a treemap, but the best use of one is to work with hierarchical, categorical data. Each of these products belongs to a category, so if I add Product_Category to “Category”, above the product name, we can shrink the size of the treemap and still get nice fidelity.
To navigate in, we have three choices. First, we can move down to the next level of the hierarchy, showing us all product names. Second, expand down to the next level of the hierarchy. And third, enable Drill Mode.
Before we go through Drill Mode, let’s add a table. This table will include the product name and the total sales amount. Great, let's continue.
Enable Drill Mode by selecting the single down arrow. When Drill Mode is active, selecting a level will drill down and expand all elements in that level. If we select jackets, we get just the product names in this category.
Note that Drill Mode is a form of cross-filtering. We can see that the table gets filtered alongside the treemap.
Next, let’s add a gauge. A gauge needs a value, like the average cost of goods sold. To make the best use of a gauge, you also want a target and a maximum value. Let's create a new target measure of Target average COGS equals 350 pounds. Let's also create a maximum average COGS measure of 1000 pounds. Putting these measures where they belong, it’s clear that the average COGS amount per order in 2019 was above the target set.
Let’s now perform some conditional formatting. Suppose we want to change the font color on the table to purple for any product with more than 10,000 pounds in total sales amount. For tables, we can navigate to cell elements, choose which column we will format, enable it for font color, and click on the conditional formatting button. We'll choose “Rule” from the drop-down list and ensure the field is Sales_Amount. Now we can set for any total sales amount between 0 and 10,000 the font will appear purple.
If we sort the sales amount column, we can see anything below 10,000 pounds is shown in purple.
Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, track performance over time versus expectations. Let’s create a new page and see how they work. Next, we'll add a new KPI visual. We’ll use the total sales amount as the indicator and the year as the trend axis. Our target sales amount can be created as a new measure and set to two million pounds. This will be Target for the visual. We can see that the company did not meet that goal for the last year and was over 10% below it.
Let’s add another KPI, this time looking at total COGS. Let’s create a target for total COGS of one million pounds. Drag the relevant measures onto the visual, and it looks bad, but that’s not quite right. COGS is an expense for the company, so the lower, the better, but we show that as a bad thing!
To fix that, navigate to the format menu, select trend axis, and change the direction to “Low is good". Now we can see that the total COGS for 2021 is on the right side of that measure.
We’ve looked at a lot here. Now it’s your turn to try things out.
2. Let's practice!