To make more sense of the data, we need to slice and dice the data in various ways and also look at it from various angles.
Being able to sort the data in ascending, descending or even in a custom manual order will help us put the data into a certain specific order and categorize it better.
Let's say we have around 1,000 customers in our data. Just showing the customers in a random order may not be of much use to us. However, if we sort the customers in descending order by profit, we can see the most profitable customers at the top and the lowest profitable customers at the bottom. However, sorting these customers in ascending order by profit will give us lowest profitable customers at the top followed by the most profitable customers at the bottom.
An example of a manual sort could be sorting the regions in a specific way so that it reads NEWS (North, East, West, and South).
There are various ways of sorting the data in Tableau. Let us look at the steps in the following recipe...