Crafting Reports with Tableau Under Pressure

We have an emergency. We need to create a data analysis report quick. We have our boss who's looking at us like he has a clock as his face and he's waiting for us on a deadline.

We need to create something really quick. I'll show you what you could do in Tableau really quickly, much faster than you can ever do it in Excel. And ultimately, you're not gonna be able to do this right away unless you've had some experience with Tableau.

This is just to give you an example of something you can do really quickly. And then you'll learn how to do this. Now, I'm in the area where I see the connections.

This is not where I'm gonna create my information. This will always be here if I need to get back to it. But down below, there's a little pop-up.

You might've noticed it. After you've made your connection, like I said, this is linear. You're going from one step to another.

The first step is connecting. The next step is to go to the worksheet. They literally tell you, go to worksheet.

So I'm gonna click here and I'm going to the worksheet. And so this is like a worksheet tab in Excel. In Excel, and I'll just show you, if I open up a blank Excel spreadsheet, this is sheet one, just like in Tableau.

This is like would be the area where I would create my chart. The difference here is we have additional parts of the screen and not just the sheet. So let me go through the interface.

Actually, no, I'm not going through the interface. I'm gonna show you how we can create a report really quick. We need to create a category region report for profit, quantity, and sales ASAP.

My boss says, I paid you a lot of money. You took the Tableau class and you have SQL credentials. Could you please create a report for me very quickly? So I'm gonna do that.

So I'm gonna go over here. And so what does he wanna see? Category, I wanna also choose region, which is down here. And I also want quantity, profit, and sales.

I've selected those fields. I'm gonna go over to show me. I'm gonna click on this recommended bar chart.

I'm done. Imagine doing that in Excel. It would take much longer.

What people are paying you for is to be able to create a report that quickly because they know you can based on what's available, what's possible in Tableau. Now, some people, they may not even be satisfied with what you just did. They're like, yeah, you know, this report is, it's interesting, but it doesn't really communicate to me.

Could you do something to make this look more interesting? Okay. Well, first, let me actually use the whole sheet. So I'll go over here and choose entire view.

That's a little bit better. People can see the information a little bit better. And then maybe I want to apply a color to each of these bars.

So let me select sales and then I'll bring this in and apply that color. And then let me select quantity and then I'll go in and choose a color for that. And then I'll go here for profit and also choose a color for that.

You know, I don't like the fact that all these are the same color. So I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna double click on profit and I'll choose a different color. Maybe I'll choose something like red.

I'll click okay. That's better. And then I'll head over to sum of quantity.

I'll click the drop down here. Let's do green for that. I'll click okay.

And I'll leave the last one blue. Oh, and by the way, could you show me numbers for each of the bars? Yeah, one click here on the T, I'm done. And so the ability to fluidly create something like this that quickly for other people who don't know what to do and what to navigate and what to click on, it could take them an hour to do something like this.

I did this in a couple of seconds. This is just to show you what's possible with Tableau. Let me see if there's anything else I wanna show you regarding this.

So the goal is not for you to do what I did. I went through it very quickly. You'll probably say, hey, you went too fast.

Could you slow down and go step by step? The point is not for you to be able to replicate what I just did. It's just for you to be able to see what's possible. So I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna click undo, undo.

You have an undo button at the top. It's the arrow that's pointing to the left. You can also use control Z. And so I'm gonna go back in time.

And for those of you who weren't able to get that legend to show up, I'll show you exactly what I did to get it to show up. I don't have a legend right now. I don't have a legend right now.

You may not either. If you went here to change the color, that's not what you wanna do. You want the color to be based on the value of sales.

And so the nice thing about Tableau is if you take a field that has numerous values, then it's gonna do something like conditional formatting. Is it data bars? No, color scale. It's gonna do a color scale based on the scale of the values.

Now, you might not be good with holding onto the control key. I'll show you a much easier way to do this. Click on sales on the left and then drag it over here and just put it on sales.

You don't have to hold onto control. Click on quantity, take quantity over here on the left and drag it and put it on the color box icon. Then click on sum of profit, then take profit and drag it over to the color section.

And so now the density of the color relates to the values. The darker the color, the higher the value. The lighter the color, the lower the value.

And if it's negative, it's a completely different color. And up here, it's a negative value. So this is sort of like showing you the whole movie but we haven't even started to figure out how we got to the ending.

So I just showed you the whole movie. We went through the ending, but we don't even know how to use the interface. So that's what we're gonna learn as we go through this.

Now, whatever work that we did here, you can clear it all out. Also part of the interface is this little X right here. If I click that, that's sort of like clear all formatting, clear sheet.

There's also a keyboard shortcut. One click, and then now I can start from fresh. And then I can start to tell you about the interface.

We're gonna do that. And you're gonna learn how to work with these visualizations. So this was the first step.

What to do? Well, again, I have it all in the PowerPoint. Select all the fields and do the show me and then for bar chart. The boss needs a better graphic design.

So enter the, do choose entire view, add colors from the sidebar. I did it from dragging and dropping but the sidebar is probably gonna be easier for you. Change the color, add text labels.

You can add text labels just by clicking on this letter T. You could also add text labels here on the side but just clicking this letter T automatically puts text labels for numerical values. But when we create charts, I'll show you how to do that. So that is the power of Tableau visualizations.