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Data Storytelling
15h22m
Some insights benefit from displaying data points individually, so stakeholders can examine and compare them numerically. Tableau's scrollable interface lets the audience investigate data directly, and serves as the foundation for heatmaps. Tables in Tableau are a versatile way to display and explore your data in a familiar spreadsheet-like format. They allow you to organize your information by rows and columns, while offering interactive features like scrolling, filtering, and dynamic sorting. With Tableau Tables, you can present raw numbers and enhance those numbers with conditional formatting, calculated fields, and tooltips. Back at it with Northwind Traders. You've shown your pie chart and map to the Vice President of Sales, and they're loving the data. However, they've also expressed a desire to get hands-on with the data and explore the numbers of orders and customers by country. You've decided to put together a table of key metrics that they can explore on their own. Previously, you developed your pie chart and map in this workbook connected to the Northwind Traders dataset. Create a new tab called Global Orders Table. Add country from the Customers table to the Rows shelf, then Count of Customers, Count of Orders, and Unit Price to the Columns shelf. Change the aggregation function of Unit Price to Average. You'll notice that this creates a series of bar charts. To turn it into a table, click the Show Me button, and then change the chart type to a table. Your VP of Sales can now examine the specifics of the different orders from each country. Say you want to further break down this data by company name rather than just having the aggregated values for each country. Drag Company Name from the Customers table to the Rows shelf. Cool, now your data has been disaggregated somewhat so your stakeholder can examine the data for each individual company. Remove Count of Companies from the Measure Value section since it's redundant now, and you can replace it with the Sum of Quantity, which represents the total product orders. Notice that a few company names are cut off. Drag this divider to the right to create some more space. You can also achieve a similar effect for the other columns by making the header row taller and the columns a bit wider. Notice that changing the width of one of them changes them all. You can also rename Average Unit Price to just Average Price. Your stakeholders can also choose to sort this table using the options up here by the column headers. Clicking here sorts by average unit price within each major category, so it's sorting companies within each country as well as the countries themselves. So for example, in Argentina, Cactus Comidas Pereyarvar has the most orders, and Oceano Atlantico Limitada has the least number of orders with five. Just like with filters, you're changing the default view right now, but after you publish this visualization, anyone viewing it can customize their own view. To make it easier to spot patterns and outliers, you can apply conditional formatting to color the text. To color the text based on the count of orders, drag Count of Orders onto the color box. That colors the text, which can be a bit hard to see, especially for the lighter values. Change marks from automatic to square, creating a highlight table. That's a nice table! Right now, because the table is sorted by count of orders, there's a consistent pattern with darker rows at the top of each country. The ranking for Average Unit Price is a bit more mixed. Finally, you might consider adding a total row at the bottom of this table, visualizing data for all countries and companies. Use Analysis, Totals, Show Column Grand Totals. Right-click this row, Column Totals to Top, to make them a bit more visible as a snapshot for your busy VP. So, all in all, the average unit price across all companies was $29, with 830 orders so far and over 51,000 products ordered. This visualization would be great to include in a report appendix or send directly to your stakeholder. Tables give you a lot of flexibility for displaying data, and you can further customize their formatting to create heatmaps. You'll see how in the next video.