Learn how to adjust measure calculations in Tableau to reflect different data summaries, such as averages or medians, instead of default sums. Gain practical insights into customizing chart types, including how to effectively create and modify line and area charts for more accurate data representation.
Key Insights
- Tableau defaults to summing measures, but users can change this to other calculations like average, median, or count by selecting a different option within the Measure dropdown—similar to how pivot tables operate.
- Creating certain chart types, such as line charts, may require using date fields or manually overriding Tableau’s automatic chart selection through the dropdown menu in the visualization pane.
- Noble Desktop’s lesson explains how to manipulate chart elements—such as controlling marker visibility through the color settings and adjusting line thickness by dragging measures like sales to the size field—for more tailored and informative visualizations.
This lesson is a preview from our Tableau Course Online (includes software). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Measures. By default, you're going to see the sum, just like when you work in a pivot table. But if someone said, could you show me a report that doesn't show me the sum, but the average for all of my categories and subcategories? So I'm going to go over to category sub here.
I'm going to duplicate and I'm going to go over here and rename this and call this average. Average is a different calculation than sum, so it is going to change my values. So I have to be clear that this is going to give me a category sub for average.
Now, I don't want the sum of sales, so I'm going to click here and I'm going to go to measure. And this is where I see sum, and this is where I can choose different calculations, just like you would do in a pivot table. I'm going to choose average.
And when I choose average, this now gives me the average. So it's very small. My automatic calculations don't really work well for showing the average here.
Let me see if I can choose another value. I'll go over here. Let's do max.
No, I did minimum. Max. Yeah.
So this is probably not going to be a good calculation because this information is going across all four years. But I would have to do this on a better, let's see, count. Yeah, no.
I'll go over here and I'll change it back to sum. So sum is going to work better for this, but you can do other calculations. Let's do median.
Yeah, so it's not working. I probably have too much detail. Let me take out category.
Yeah, no. So not ideal. So that's how you would change measures depending on the type of calculation that you want.
It's the same feature that's available in pivot tables. All right. Formatting a visualization.
We covered most of this. I want to create a line chart. I haven't shown you how to create a line chart.
The problem with creating a line chart, and I'm going to change this. Instead of doing average, I'm going to change this into a line chart. The problem with creating a line chart is for some reason in the show me, they're not going to offer you a line chart unless you're working with a date.
And so you might have to force this into a line chart. Everything is automatic, but you can change that. So if you look here at automatic, you're going to click the drop down here.
And for the first time, maybe the first time, as you're looking at this information, you're going to notice that you can change the chart type to be something other than what Tableau chooses. I want to change this into a line chart. Maybe I'll try an area chart.
What does an area chart look like? It looks like this. Now, because I have category, it's breaking up the information. I'll take category out.
And so now I'm seeing my values for all the subcategories by sales. Let's say I don't like an area chart. I'm going to click the drop down and choose line.
And now I have my line chart. Now, with your line chart, you can do a little bit of work with this, not that much. What's disappointing about the line chart are these little dots.
These represent the points. If you want to change them, where can you go to change them? Well, you'd think it would might be someplace like path or detail, but it's actually in color. For some reason, Tableau puts this in color.
If I click color, here are where you can display your markers. So you have all, you have none, and automatic. So it's basically your two choices.
If I choose all, it makes a minor change. I can say none. Don't show me anything.
Show me something. Don't show me something. Those are your only two options.
So if you stick to automatic, it'll do that. Can you make it bigger? No. You can make it bigger by using a trick.
And the trick we'll use tomorrow is combining two charts, a circle chart and a line chart. But the circle is going to represent the high points and the low points. We haven't talked too much about size.
What can you do with size besides increase the size of the pie chart? You can also change the size of the line based on a measure. And it's appropriate because a measure measures the line based on the amount. This represents sales.
I'll take sales and I'll move it into size. The bar now represents the size of sales. And so this is another way, again, to communicate information about your sales.
So we're doing so, we're doing pretty good so far. We have a pie chart. We have a bar chart.
I'll switch this over. We have a column chart and we have a line chart. That is controlling color, size.
We did text, label, detail, tool tip and controlling additionals. Yeah, so we did this. Chart types.
Yep, we changed it to a line. My images are all over the place. Something happened to my PowerPoint.
Automatic is the default, but you can change the chart type. Yes, we created a text table. Duplicate is crosstab.
Okay, these visuals work. We did that. Resizing visualizations.
Yep, we did that. Formatting text.