1. EDA in Tableau: tables and bar plots
Getting to know your data by creating tables and bar plots of counts of your categorical variables is a great way to start your EDA.
Let's see how you do this in Tableau. We will be using the superstore dataset, containing fictional orders of furniture, technology, and office supplies. Each row of the data represents an individual order, categorized by several traits. These include product category, location, manufacturer, and shipping mode.
Creating tables in Tableau is really easy: you drag the categorical variable of interest to the rows shelf, then drag the automatically created count measure to the text mark. By default, this will result in a count table. A nice trick to add the header of the categorical variable with one action, is dragging the measure values field to the column, and the header will appear. This also allows you to sort the counts in ascending or descending order, by clicking this icon on the header.
Changing the table into a bar plot is done by clicking the Show Me button, and then selecting the horizontal bars. Often, it makes more sense to switch the axes, which requires an additional click. There is nothing more to it than that!
2. Tableau Time!