1. How to create visualizations in Tableau
Hi again! I hope you’re enjoying the course so far.
This is the state in which we left our sheet in the last video.
Isn’t there another way to visualize the count and proportion of reviews for the different types of rooms, instead of clicking or browsing through a dull table?
We’re talking about Tableau, of course there is!
And it’s incredibly easy. See this Show Me button, in the top right corner of the interface?
Tableau is smart: based on the data you use to create your view, it can suggest appropriate visualization options.
In our case, we could build a pie chart, a bar chart, a box plot, or a bubble plot, for example.
Let’s go with a stacked bar chart.
Et voilà! It’s that easy to build visualizations in Tableau. Notice how our pages disappeared.
Now, we have a bar for each neighborhood. The height of the bar is the total number of reviews, but we also have more granular information for each room type. Tableau automatically created a color legend.
You can see that there is often a similar proportion of reviews for entire homes (in blue) and private rooms (in yellow). Shared rooms, in red, have the least number of reviews.
However, Downtown Civic Center has many more reviews for private rooms than entire homes.
And Financial District is the neighborhood with the most reviews for shared rooms.
Mission is the neighborhood with the most reviews overall.
It’s much easier to read that from a stacked bar chart than from a table!
For peace of mind, let’s look at some other options that Show Me offers. Pie charts are not very helpful, we just get one pie chart per neighborhood. Side by side bars give us a very dense plot, and there are too many colors, information just does not jump to our eyes.
A box plot is interesting, if you know how to interpret it. With 3,009 reviews, Downtown Civic Center is at the median for the Entire home/apartment category. In other words, if we were to take all reviews per neighborhood for each type of apartment and order them in ascending order, Downtown Civic Center would be right in the middle for the entire home category. You can confirm the median value by looking at the box plot metrics. Mission is considered an outlier with more than 15,000 reviews.
Notice what happened: as you hover over elements on the canvas, you get more information about them. The box that appears is called a tooltip.
Let’s go back to the stacked bar chart. If you want to know the exact number of reviews for the entire home/apartment segment in Mission, you can hover over this blue area. Unsurprisingly, it reveals the same number of reviews as we saw in our box plot.
There are two key takeaways here. One, Tableau makes it super easy to try different visualizations. Two, Tableau shows you what you CAN build, not what you SHOULD build. It’s up to you to build a visualization that makes sense based on the question you want to answer.
There are many things you could do to customize this chart further. For example, you may want to see the reviews count directly instead of hovering over bars on a case-by-case basis. To do this, you can click this Show Mark Labels button.
Now it’s explicit that Mission has 15,768 reviews for entire homes and apartments, and 17,376 reviews for private rooms. The shared rooms area is too small to show a number, but you can still hover over it to find out there are only 1,268.
Now it’s your turn to build some visualizations in this chapter’s last set of exercises!
2. Let's practice!