Creating Interactive Pie Charts with Show Me Features

Let's create a pie chart. So I'm going to show you how to create a pie chart. I'm going to have sheet one be a pie chart.

I'm going to clear this. It's nice to be able to clear things. Let's create a pie chart.

Now, the show me feature is going to be the best option for creating a pie chart. All the other types of charts, the bar charts that we created, it's very easy to create just by dragging the fields up here. But for the pie chart, it's a little more complex.

You can't just drag the fields up here to create a pie chart. So how do you create a pie chart? You're going to click on show me. It wants to help you out.

Everything is grayed out. So you can't really create anything now because you don't have anything selected on the left. Now, I am interested in creating a pie chart.

What's changing at the bottom? Every time I move my mouse, something changes at the bottom. This is telling you what you need to create each type of chart. So here for the pie chart, you need one dimension, one or more dimensions, or one or two measures.

So you need at least one dimension and one measure. So I'm going to tell you the ones that we need to select. Now, how do you select them? You can just leave this here.

A weird thing, you can drag it and you can move it around, but it's not really useful because it's going to get in the way. So you can just close it. If you want to bring this back, just click here.

Now, a good thing to create a pie chart from are values and something that doesn't have a lot of values. So a good dimension to use for creating a pie chart is person. I'm going to click person.

Then I'm going to hold down to control and I'm going to click sales. Now, what happens is that in the show me, anything that I could create by selecting a dimension and a measure is visible for me. If I want to create a pie chart, what does it take? One click.

I created the pie chart. I changed my mind. Can I create a different type? Just click.

Oh, that's interesting. Maybe it would look better horizontally. So I'll click here.

Yeah, that's better. It's easy to switch to each type of chart that I want to create. Just click the button for the type I want.

But I want to create a pie chart. This is why a pie chart is a little more difficult to create. You have to use these parts of the marks card.

There's nothing up here. So it's much easier to create a pie chart using this. Now I've created my pie chart.

It puts things in the right place. I can hide the show me. I get a little legend and automatically comes up.

That's the benefit of show me. Tableau does this for you automatically. I want to name this pie chart.

So you can double click here and I'll call this pie chart. This will be one of the worksheets I'll use for my data visualization. I'm going to catch up to where we're at.

I went through the steps and I didn't go through the PowerPoint. This is great for pie charts. Most of what you will do here is drag and drop or right click.

Hover over the show me to see the pie chart required fields. We did that. On the PC use control.

On the Mac use command to select more than one field. The relevant charts are then highlighted in the show me. Click on the pie chart to create the pie chart.

It is small. Why is it so small? By default, when you add in a visualization, there's an invisible box that you can't see that you can resize. What do you mean? If I move my mouse over to the left, if I see a double line, I can drag it across and it does that.

What if I want to make it taller? If I move my mouse here towards the bottom, when I see that double arrow, I can drag this down. This makes it a little bit bigger. So you can control the size just by looking for that invisible line.

But what if you don't want to look for that invisible line? Well, the standard is that it's that small, but guess what? You can click the dropdown here and fit the width. I'm going to fit width. That moves it into center.

What if I fit height? That fits it in the height. I want the entire view. You'll choose entire view.

Most of the time you'll choose entire view. Now you have your chart and you're saying, well, I have my chart. It's kind of naked.

There's nothing there. Well, the tool tips are automatically there. If you hover your mouse over any of the pie, you can see tool tips.

Yeah, but you know, Garfield, that when you create a pie chart, you have labels on the side. How do you do that? Well, this is called label. Choose what you want to see as a label.

Well, I'd like to see the people. Okay. Take person and drag it to label.

Do you see them? Yeah. Well, it's not enough. I also want to see the sales.

Well, what do you think you would do for that? Take the sales and move it to label. Yeah. You can pick what you want to see.

If you want to make this bigger, you can. Yeah. You know, it's big, but I think it could be bigger.

How could I make it bigger? Maybe size. Maybe if I drag it this. Oh, yeah.

So this is almost like a control panel. There's something else I always wanted to figure out. How do I do percentage? If you want to do percentage, there is something called a quick calculation.

You don't have to do any math. So this is the value for sales that we brought into the label. How do I know it has a little T here? If you click the drop down right here, you want to go over to quick table calculation and then choose percentage of total.

This is very much like a Pivot Table when you go to show value as and you choose a calculation. So I'll choose percentage. And now I have the percentage, but I lost the amount for sales.

I know. So you got to bring it over again. Like, really? Yeah.

Take sales and bring it over into labels. Oh, there it is. Is there a way that I could have the label for percentage underneath the sales? I don't like it in the middle.

Yes. There's a very simple way to control that here. All you have to do is change the position of the sales for the amount and the percentage.

This is the percentage. This is the sales. I'm going to take this.

I'm going to just drag it up one. Make sure you don't drag it on top or you'll make it disappear. You look for that little orange triangle when you let go.

Now you just change the position. What if I want to change the label? It looks kind of small. So you'll go over to text where the label is.

You'll click here. It's all very intuitive. And then this is the text.

You have font here as well. I'm going to go over here. Let's say I increase the font size.

I'll make this 14. Oh, that's cool. That's it.

And so now what if I want to present this? I'll just click this button here and you can present the information. Now, this is just the first chart we've created. What if I wanted to highlight somebody's results? You can click here and choose the person you want to focus on.

Do that. You can include or exclude people. Now you're practically doing a visualization that you can control right from here.

And then just click back in the chart. You'll get everyone back again. When you press escape, you come out of this.

But this is initially how to create a pie chart. Show me is going to be your best option for creating the pie chart. Very easy.

You don't have to worry about doing all of this stuff. It does most of it for you. And you're now starting to learn about how the marks card works.

It controls color. It controls size. If you wanted to change any of these colors, just click color and choose edit colors.

And when you choose edit colors, you can pick different colors for each person. This is a different type of color palette because these are related to dimensions. When we were working with bars before, we had a gradient.

But when you're working with dimensions, you only get a certain limited amount of colors. If you don't like this color set, you can click the drop down here and choose some other types of color sets. Traffic light, I can choose this weird one here.

And so what you'll do is you'll select the one that you want to change and click on the color that you want. And then now it changes color. If I don't want this to be orange, I want this to be this color, I do that.

Click that, I do that. You can click apply to see what it looks like before you close. Or you can click cancel if you're happy with what you have.

So that is a pie chart. Next thing we'll want to do is create a bar chart. Let me just check to see where we're at.

So I did a little bit more. I added the labels in addition to the tool tips. Yay, we created our first visualization.

It's small, but you can adjust it with your mouse. Tool tips are automatically there. We added labels to the marks card.

You can customize using the text icon. If you want to, here's something that's dangerous. I'll let you know this since we're actually working on this now.

If I click on text label, I can click here on this three button area. This opens up the values that I see here. I can rearrange them.

I can move them around. I can increase the font size. If I want to make this larger, I'll click the drop down here, make it maybe, I don't know, 16.

I'll make it bold. I'll choose a different color other than black, maybe blue. And if I click apply, I can take a look at it before I click okay.

And that's how I can change. If I want to move some of sales underneath the percentage, I can copy this and then, or cut it and put it underneath. And you can move it around.

And you can always preview stuff. You can insert the fields. If you delete them by mistake, you can add them back in.

So this is a window that controls what you see here. And you have customization options here. So you just have to say label, and then you click the three dots.

All right. So that's what I was talking about here. I have it outlined in the PowerPoint label, click these three dots, go over here, and you can format the values here and it determines what you see over here.