1. Make your data visually appealing
Welcome to the final chapter of this course. My name is Carl, and I will be your instructor.
You will learn how to make your graphs visually appealing and ready to show to your professor, fellow students, boss, or even your grandma! You will learn how to format your visualizations, how to create a dual axis graph, and even how to create your first dashboard!
2. The art of formatting
First, let's see how not to build a graph. This line chart has many issues: an unclear title, no legend, a rather small font size, and missing axes titles. Let's have a look at how we can improve it.
3. The art of formatting
This looks way better! First of all, we notice that one of the lines, corresponding to the global sales, was replaced by a bar chart. This was done to make it clear that this metric is slightly different than the lines representing sales by region.
Secondly, the chart now has a clear title, the font size is bigger, the axes are clearly labeled, and there is a legend explaining the colors on the graph. We are looking at video game sales by release year per region. Notice 2008 was the best selling year with almost 700 million video game sales worldwide.
4. Formatting tips
Let's have a look at formatting tips in general. Using the following techniques, you can easily enhance your visualizations: write informative titles that explain the content of the graph, use colors and large enough fonts to increase legibility, add a legend to explain colors, adjust axes and their titles if necessary, and create tooltips so the user learns more when hovering over the graph.
As a data visualization tool, Tableau has great default formatting options. It should give you a great starting spot, but you can easily adjust the formatting if necessary.
5. Format at the workbook and sheet level
You can format at both the workbook and sheet level. But what exactly is the difference between the two? A workbook is what you open at the start of an exercise. It can be used to organize, save, share, and publish results.
It contains multiple sheets and can be compared to a whole Excel file.
A sheet on the other hand can be compared to a single tab in Excel. They are displayed along the bottom of a workbook as tabs. There are three different types of sheets: worksheets, which is what you used this far to create visualizations, and dashboards and stories, but more on that later.
6. Let's practice!
Let's test if you understand the basics of formatting.