Unlocking the Power of Data Visualization

Data visualization basics. So let's go over this. The brain views information in specific ways.

The power of you being able to be someone who gets paid $10,000 or $15,000 more than someone else is having awareness of how your information is going to communicate to someone who's looking at it. People don't want to look at complicated information to try to figure stuff out. So I'm going to show you an example where I'm going to create a text table.

So again, this is like an experiment where I'm just going to jump ahead and show you something. You're not going to know how I did it, but ultimately, we're going to learn the steps. So this is like a trailer for the movie.

And you're like, how do I do? No, you didn't even see the movie yet. It's just a trailer. You're excited.

I know you want to get to the end and but we have to go step by step. So I'm going to go to category. And I'm going to take category.

I'm going to drag it over here. And these are the categories. There are three categories.

Let's see. Actually, no, I don't want to use categories. I want to use subcategories.

Now, here is a pill. And this is sort of like how it works with a pivot table. Let me go to an Excel spreadsheet and open up something just to show you.

Those of you who are familiar with Excel, you'll probably love this. So let me go to Excel here. I'm going to head over to tables.

I'm going to delete all this. Probably going to end up showing you a lot of things earlier than I thought I thought I would. But as long as it helps you to understand, that's what counts.

Okay. So I'm going to create a pivot table. You see these? These are these.

What do you do with these? You take them and you drag them and you put them into boxes and you get something like that. What did I do here? Let's take subcategory. Oh, let me take this out.

Wait, what did you do? Didn't you know you could do this? Isn't that the same? Oh, they stole it from Excel. They should sue for copyright infringement. Now, I can not only drag it up here, I could also drag it here.

You can drag directly into the area. This is drop field here or drop field here. This does rows.

This does columns. Rows. Columns.

Rows. Columns. Yeah.

So you mean this is Excel? Yeah. And this is the area where you display the information. So I'm going to take category.

I'm going to drag it over here. Oh, you know what? This is not that difficult at all. Now, I have ABC.

I want to display numbers here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take sales and this is something you can do because there's a different version of pivot tables where you can drag the fields directly onto the pivot table. It's an old style view.

It's something that you can customize. Let me see if I go here to options. Let's see.

Classic pivot table layout. I'll click here. Oh, you know what? They've completely stole this from Excel.

What the? You already have this technology. So I could take fields. I could drag it.

So wait a minute. You're telling me if I take department and I drag it over here? Holy mackerel. You're doing the same thing here.

This is like a big pivot table, but it's more visual. So now sales. Are you telling me I could take sales and I could drag it over here? Yeah, you can take sales and you can drag it over here.

Oh, now I see this. And this is quick and simple. Now, I have a question for you.

Show me in three seconds the third highest value. I'll wait. You could.

And so go ahead. It's if you tell your boss that he said he'll say I'm hiring someone else. Don't tell me.

I'm not here to learn the program. So here's the thing I'm going to share about this. Here's the main point.

And I have this in the PowerPoint. So I'll go over it. Could we do better? Maybe we could do something like this.

So what I would do is I'm going to undo this. Maybe I don't take the values. I mean, maybe I don't take sales and put it in here.

What if I take sales and put it up here? And then what if I sort it from here? There's a button here I could use to sort. Now, if I ask you, what is the third highest value? Takes you two seconds. If I want to add the text, I just click this little button and then there are the values.

Your job is to be able to take data that is very confusing in a spreadsheet and turn it to something that someone can look at in two seconds. They can figure this out. If I want, I can go here and choose entire view instead of half the sheet.

And then I have my visualization right there. It wasn't that difficult. It's just like working with a pivot table.

And then you just drag things into either columns or rows. It's much easier than pivot tables because pivot table has these four boxes. Here you only have two.

You mean they don't have filters? Oh, I lied. Filters is right here. Oh, they completely ripped off Microsoft.

We got columns, rows, and filters. And then these are values. The values is the area that you see here.

That's the visualization. You don't have to worry about that part. If you put in the rows and columns, it does the values automatically.

There are a lot of things in Tableau that are going to happen automatically. You just have to know where to drag and drop things. All right.

So that's another quick demonstration. Let's see if there's anything else I want to go over. The eye is able to see lengths, colors, thickness, and contrast a lot better than numerical values.

If you're doing this, you're just recreating what you could do in a spreadsheet. The whole purpose of Tableau is to make the information very easy to look at and understand. The four core charts that we're looking to create are pie charts, bar and column charts, line charts, and area charts.

Less so area, but we're going to focus on creating the core four. And so 80% of the work that you'll need to do relate to these types of charts. So those are the basics of data visualization and how you read information.

I'll show you another example. I'm going to take out sales. How do you get rid of sales? You could do the same way you do it in a pivot table.

I'm going to drag it into this empty area here, and then it just disappears. Now I want to choose profit. I'm going to take profit.

I'm going to drag it up here. Now, this doesn't necessarily look that interesting because it's all over the place. So I want to sort this.

So I'm going to go over here and I'm going to click these little sorting buttons. One click is all it takes to sort the information. I don't want to sort it this way.

I actually want to sort it this way. This is more interesting to read because people look from top left over to the right. If I want to emphasize that this is the value that is negative, I can focus just on this value and bring it right up to the top because people are going to look up here.

This is going to be better than having the information look like this. There's this like gap here. You're not highlighting.

So placement and color, and you can play with color too. If I do this, and then let's just say I want profit to display as color. Just go to profit and just drag it over to color.

I'm going to go over here and drag it over to color. Again, very easy for someone to see that this is dangerous. This is the information that represents loss of profit in tables.

It's right at the top. It's very easy to see. And then you can see here the values that are doing well.

But in this case, we're highlighting the values that are not doing well. All right. So again, you can play around with working with charts, dragging things over.

If you want to start over, this one button here will clear everything. So you don't have to drag them one at a time. One click on clear, that clears the sheet and you can start over.

So that's what color does. You want to keep things simple.