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Data Storytelling
15h22m
Most visualizations benefit from a bit of additional context. In Tableau, you can use text to mark up your charts, including both labels and annotations. You've seen throughout this program how titles and labels can drastically improve the clarity of any given chart. Labeling your axes and providing a chart title are standard steps you should perform for each visualization. Marker or bar labels can also add a layer of clarity to a chart, helping your stakeholders avoid the awkward process of reading values from gridlines, especially if a chart is cluttered. Annotations serve as powerful visual cues for highlighting important data points or displaying main takeaways. In Tableau, annotation color, text, and placement can all be customized. They also update dynamically to keep your message current, even as your data changes. You're continuing your work for Northwind Traders, and you're almost ready to share some of your visualizations with the supply chain managers. You're working on a few finishing touches to improve the clarity of your data story. Let's head over to Tableau to add those improvements. So, at this point in your analysis, you've got this bar chart that highlights quantity sold for each product with a color scale for their average price. You've also added filters based on the product's category and price bin, allowing your supply chain managers to create fine-grained reports. First, adjust the title, which defaults to the worksheet name. Notice this sheet name in angle brackets. That's a dynamic field. If you were to update the sheet name, the title would update too. Change the title to Most Ordered Products, and then bold so it stands out more. You can also generate an automatic caption to help your audience interpret the different encoded categories and filters dynamically. Go to Worksheet, Show Caption. It generates this description at the bottom explaining exactly what's in the graph. For a complex graph like this one, it can be helpful. Notice that if you update the chart, for example by selecting Seafood, the caption updates as well. Let's remove it for now, since you're going for a minimalist chart look. Next, add labels to your bar chart to display the exact quantity sold for each product. Click on Labels in the Marks card, and then select Show Mark Labels. Marks here refers to the bars in your chart. These values at the end display the average quantity sold. That makes it easier for viewers to see the exact figures without having to read from the x-axis. This is an example of double encoding. You have the values on the x-axis as well as the labels next to the bars. Since the bars already show the quantity sold, you could consider removing the axis label at the bottom right. Deselect Show Header. You could also consider removing the grid lines too for an ultra-minimalist chart. Right-click in the Workspace, Format Worksheet. There are a ton of customization options here. Choose Lines, then set Grid Lines to Off. All in all, the result is much cleaner than before. Select All Products so that you can see the full effect of all your hard work. Quickly, if you want to add a search bar to help your supply chain managers locate a specific product, you can do that by clicking on Product Name in the row shelf, and then selecting Show Highlighter. Now they can search here for a product like Sir Rodney's Marmalade. In Tableau, you can add annotations to individual bars or just to the chart area. Say you want to indicate that Sir Rodney's Marmalade is a luxury product seeing increased demand from suppliers. Right-click on the bar, select Annotate, then Mark. Notice that this default annotation is the same as what appears on the tooltip when you hover over any given bar. You can use these placeholders, which will update dynamically, but contextualize them with a complete sentence. For example, at an average price of average unit price, Product Name is a luxury product seeing increased demand from suppliers. Click OK, and the annotation appears at the end of the bar. Click on it, then click again to move it. You can also resize the box to minimize the line breaks. Notice that if you filter out confections, the annotation for Sir Rodney's Marmalade disappears. That's super useful since you wouldn't want it to stick around for a supply chain manager working with a different category of goods. Say you want to annotate the chart with the date last updated, so your supply chain managers can see at a glance how up-to-date this info is. Right-click anywhere in the chart area, select Annotation, Area. Write Date Last Updated, then insert the Date Updated time field from the drop-down menu. Nice. Click on the box to move it, and use the handles in the corner to resize it. You can place it in the top right corner for legibility. Before moving on, be sure to save your work by clicking Publish. So, you saw that to edit text like titles and annotations in Tableau, use a mix of static and dynamic content to create your annotation. You saw that the Insert menu allows you to add fields like Data Last Updated to the annotation with angle brackets. You can also use fields from your data like product name as well as aggregations like average unit price within your annotation. You learned that you can annotate either individual marks like bars or the chart area itself. And you also saw that annotations are filtered dynamically alongside your data. Annotations are fantastic for making your data visualizations clear and actionable. In the next video, you'll explore one of the most powerful and dynamic features of Tableau, Tool Tips. I'll see you there.