Book Image

Tableau Cookbook - Recipes for Data Visualization

By : Shweta Sankhe-Savale
Book Image

Tableau Cookbook - Recipes for Data Visualization

By: Shweta Sankhe-Savale

Overview of this book

Data is everywhere and everything is data! Visualization of data allows us to bring out the underlying trends and patterns inherent in the data and gain insights that enable faster and smarter decision making. Tableau is one of the fastest growing and industry leading Business Intelligence platforms that empowers business users to easily visualize their data and discover insights at the speed of thought. Tableau is a self-service BI platform designed to make data visualization and analysis as intuitive as possible. Creating visualizations with simple drag-and-drop, you can be up and running on Tableau in no time. Starting from the fundamentals such as getting familiarized with Tableau Desktop, connecting to common data sources and building standard charts; you will walk through the nitty gritty of Tableau such as creating dynamic analytics with parameters, blended data sources, and advanced calculations. You will also learn to group members into higher levels, sort the data in a specific order & filter out the unnecessary information. You will then create calculations in Tableau & understand the flexibility & power they have and go on to building story-boards and share your insights with others. Whether you are just getting started or whether you need a quick reference on a “how-to” question, This book is the perfect companion for you
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Tableau Cookbook – Recipes for Data Visualization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Sorting our data


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...