Enhance your Tableau visualizations by adding hierarchical depth with multiple data dimensions, such as categories, subcategories, and individual products. Understand how to manipulate and structure your data to display meaningful insights without compromising clarity or performance.
Key Insights
- Learn how to create multilevel visualizations in Tableau by layering dimensions like category, subcategory, and product to reveal more granular insights.
- Understand the importance of organizing data hierarchies effectively, with the ability to rearrange fields for optimal clarity and usability, such as placing subcategories beneath categories in bar charts or swapping row/column orientations.
- Noble Desktop demonstrates how to evaluate field complexity using the "Describe" option in Tableau to determine the number of members in a dimension—helpful for avoiding overly detailed or impractical visualizations.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Now let's do something else. We wanna add another dimension to this. This is literally like adding another dimension to our data.
I'm gonna start by creating a bar chart or a column chart just using category. So I'm gonna create a new sheet and I can just click this button right here or up here. Keyboard shortcut is Control M. If I press Control M, that automatically creates a new sheet.
I'm gonna take sales, I'm gonna move it into rows. Then I'm gonna take category and I'm gonna move that into columns. We're just looking at three categories.
By default, I can resize by looking for the invisible double arrow and dragging this across to make it a little bit wider. But like I said, you probably want to choose entire view. Now, when you do this, you might say, that's kind of like a little too big.
I don't see how this would be practical. So category is useful, just like when you're working in a Pivot Table. I'm gonna go into the Excel Pivot Table for a little bit.
So let me go to, where's my Pivot Table? Okay, so I'll just recreate my Pivot Table. Insert, Pivot Table, I'll click OK. This is one of the things you do when you're working with a Pivot Table.
You take, let's say division, and you drag it here and you get four divisions. And let's say you take hours. I didn't calculate the total pay, I'll just work with hours for now.
And then this is the total amount of hours. So what can you do besides just working on one level? You can take department and you can move it underneath division. And when you do that, you split the information up, you see more detail.
You can also do that in Tableau. When I have category here, I would like to take subcategory and add it right alongside right after category. And now I'm seeing my information on two levels.
I'm seeing it on the subcategory basis, but on a higher level, I'm seeing it on the category basis. So I have the categories on top and I have the subcategories below. And so this is how you can create greater detail.
If I wanna swap this, I can go and click this button here to swap. And now this is a different type of display. It's a little clearer that I can see furniture includes these categories, subcategories, office supplies, these, and so on.
Depending on how you wanna display your information, you can even take subcategory and move it before category. Again, you'll play around with this and then you'll see what works best for you. Is it bad? Maybe, maybe not.
But I'll drag it over and maybe you wanna see the information like this. And you might say, you know what? I prefer it the other way. You could even drill down even further.
The thing is you can't really break this. You might create something that's not practical, but you'll still see all the information. For instance, I'm gonna switch back to columns.
Now, what are these categories related to? They're related to products. So maybe I wanna bring in the product underneath the subcategory. So I'm gonna take product and I'm gonna drag it over to subcategory.
I get a warning. I have 2,025 members. Do I really wanna do this? It's saying, you know what? I don't think it's practical.
And you're saying, you know what? That's not your choice to make. I appreciate your advice, but I wanna add them all. And it will add them all.
But it's not practical. But like I said, you can't break it. It just hides information where there's too many, but it's actually showing you all the products under the subcategory.
If you wanna find out how many values you have in a particular field, there's a very easy way to do this. And for the subcategory, when you click this dropdown, there are many options to pick from here. The one I'm looking for is describe.
When I click describe, it shows me I have 17 members. So in a way, it's like knowing how much detail you wanna display. 17 is just right for this type of chart.
If I wanna know how many categories I have, I can do the same thing, describe. I have three members. Products, that one I had, product name, the one I had a problem with, I'm gonna click here, choose describe.
This is part of getting to know your data. I have 1,800 members.