Book Image

Learning Tableau 2020 - Fourth Edition

By : Joshua N. Milligan
Book Image

Learning Tableau 2020 - Fourth Edition

By: Joshua N. Milligan

Overview of this book

Learning Tableau strengthens your command on Tableau fundamentals and builds on advanced topics. The book starts by taking you through foundational principles of Tableau. We then demonstrate various types of connections and how to work with metadata. We teach you to use a wide variety of visualizations to analyze and communicate the data, and introduce you to calculations and parameters. We then take an in-depth look at level of detail (LOD) expressions and use them to solve complex data challenges. Up next, we show table calculations, how to extend and alter default visualizations, build an interactive dashboard, and master the art of telling stories with data. This Tableau book will introduce you to visual statistical analytics capabilities, create different types of visualizations and dynamic dashboards for rich user experiences. We then move on to maps and geospatial visualization, and the new Data Model capabilities introduced in Tableau 2020.2. You will further use Tableau Prep’s ability to clean and structure data and share the stories contained in your data. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in implementing the powerful features of Tableau 2020 for decision-making.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
9
Visual Analytics – Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting
17
Other Books You May Enjoy
18
Index

Leveraging formatting in Tableau

We'll focus on worksheet-level formatting in this chapter, as we've already covered metadata in Chapter 2, Connecting to Data in Tableau, and we will cover dashboards and stories in Chapter 8, Telling a Data Story with Dashboards. However, it is beneficial to see the big picture of formatting in Tableau.

Tableau employs default formatting that includes default fonts, colors, shading, and alignment. Additionally, there are several levels of formatting you can customize, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 7.1: Levels of formatting in Tableau

Let's go into them in more detail:

  • Data source level: We've already seen how you can set default formats for numeric and date fields. Other defaults, such as colors and shapes, can also be set using the Default Properties menu on the drop-down menu in the data pane.
  • Workbook level: Various global formatting options may be set. From the menu, select Format...