1. Practice what you preach
Let’s focus on various chart formatting options. We will start by building a simple visualization of # titles per Production country using Show me.
We will choose a simple bar chart.
To sort the chart in a descending way, we will click here.
Since there is a long tail of countries, we will visually select to focus only on the top ones.
Right-clicking, we keep only these countries. Let’s expand to the entire view.
We will format this chart by adding labels and dragging the measure once again from the Data Pane to the Label.
We will change the title of this chart so that the visualization is self-explanatory; let’s double click and type # Titles per country of production.
With proper labels and titles, we can remove the X axis entirely. To do that, we right-click on it and deselect “Show Header”.
Let’s also get rid of the “Production country” label here by hiding its label.
Since we no longer have the X axis, the grey vertical lines are no longer needed; let’s right-click on the canvas and access the Format menu to remove them.
There are plenty of options here. Notice that some formatting features pertain to sheets, while others only to Rows or Columns. Moreover, if we click on the arrow next to Fields, we access all measures and dimensions and can also format their labels.
The setting responsible for vertical grey lines is in the Lines menu. Let’s select the Columns tab and remove any Grid Lines.
Much better.
How about applying extra visual cues? Let’s drop the # of titles also to the size.
This shows us visually the proportion between these lines, but since the bar already does the same, we will revert this back for now.
We will also change the color to a less obtrusive one by clicking here.
We will settle for gray with a slightly darker border.
So the USA produces most titles, but are these also the most profitable ones? Let’s add a new measure, the average Gross Profit, to the visualization.
Something strange happened. The bars seem to show something different than the labels, which still seem to reflect the number of titles. This is because we now have multiple Marks cards.
We should differentiate the formatting per measure. Let’s inspect the label on Gross Profit.
It still shows # of Titles. We will change that to average Gross Profit, which we can either drag from the Data Pane or the canvas, holding the control button (command button on Macs).
By formatting the labels, we will make it clear that this chart is about money. We right-click on the measure here and select Format.
This once again gives us access to the formatting menu. Note that the Axis tab formats axes, and the Pane tab formats the data points inside the canvas.
We will adapt it to display numbers in Thousands of British Pounds, with no decimals.
Let’s also apply color to the Gross Profit mark.
We will select a custom sequential palette and change the end color to green.
Finally, we’d like to sort this chart by Gross profit. Clicking on sorting here, we always sort by the first measure.
To hint at Tableau to sort on another measure, we can first click on that other measure and click on the sort button one more time.
Lastly, we will adapt the title to reflect what the chart shows. We can even add extra visual cues to it by coloring parts of the title to represent appropriate charts.
This is a clear chart, demanding no further explanation.
It clearly shows that the quantity of produced films does not always go hand in hand with profitability. A good insight!
Now onto you - let’s nail the exercises.
2. Let's practice!