Create basic charts: Bar, Stacked Bar, Line & Scatter in Tableau

If you take a look at the Tableau Desktop Specialist exam guide, there's a section called Exploring and Analyzing data. And under that, there's a bullet saying create basic charts. And so if we start there, I'm going to switch to Tableau and start working through those topics. So first I'm going to open my South Superstore data. And bring in the Southern and start a new worksheet. And so I want to create a bar chart to begin with. And so I'm going to look and see for horizontal bars. What I need is I need at least one measure. So if I add, for example, sales to my view, then I have a very simple bar chart. It's only got one value, right? Because there are no dimensions to create headers on the bottom. So I need to add a dimension down here so that I'll have headers. So I'm going to I could either drag it here or I could drag it down down here like this. Either way, I'm going to drag the region pill over two columns and that's going to now create a header. However, there's only one region in my data set, so that's kind of a boring header. It just says South, so maybe I'll take that out. Let's do a different one. Let's try product sub category. So now I have a more interesting bar chart because instead of a single bar, it's basically segmenting the data by the product sub category. And so this is saying when I sum up the value of sales for all of the rows where the sub category is accessories, I get a total sales of 27,277. That's rounded. But I can change that. Let's go format and let's see we can change our number format here to use more decimal places if we want. Right? So now I see the .75 there, so or I can do it to one decimal place, right? I can, I can adjust it basically. And I can also change it to use a currency instead. Right. So now it's got a dollar sign so I can make some adjustments with the formatting. So here's my bar chart, basic bar chart, and if I want to do a stacked bar chart, I would need a second dimension, right? So suppose I want to have the segment in this as well. I could do this, add this here and now my bar chart. Those bars are now divided by by the business segment. So now I can see all of the different product sub categories for each product sub category. The bar is divided by the segment. So basically the blue represents the consumer segment, the orange represents the corporate, and then the red represents the Home Office. If we click this, we can actually see over here there's a legend, right? It's hidden by the show me But if I click the show me again, it'll hide it, right? So now I can see that there's this legend here that says blue is consumer, orange is corporate and red is home office. And also in the Marks area, it shows me that segment is represented by color so that each different segment is a different color. So that's one option that's a little more complicated bar chart. The other thing I can do is a side by side bar, right? So now I'm showing the consumer segment, the corporate segment, and the Home Office segment in different sections. And then within each section it shows me all of the different product sub categories. Or I could switch it and move it this way. And now I see each product sub category on the top with its own area and then within that next to it I see consumer, Corporate Home office, consumer, corporate home office. So this shows me each sub category and then within each sub category, each business segment. The next topic is create a line chart and line charts are different from bar charts in that they always involve a date dimension. And so I'm going to begin my line chart by adding order, date and sales. And then I go to the Show Me tab and I select lines discrete. And so here is my line chart. And since it's a line chart using a discrete date, what I get on the bottom is headers. Because when there's a discrete field and this is blue indicating discrete, I get headers. If I switch to a continuous line chart, I instead get an axis. And so we'll talk more in the course about the difference between discrete and continuous. But basically here's my continuous value and so I get an axis versus my discrete and so now I get headers. So that's a line chart. And if I click the plus, then it will expand and give me more detail on the line chart. So now I'm seeing the quarter and now I'm seeing the month and now I'm seeing the day, right? So that's and these are all discrete. So each of these is a separate header, but I can flip and do continuous. And so now I see the daily sales values on my line chart. All right. The next topic under basic charts is a scatter plot, and a scatter plot is useful for looking at two measures and seeing how they vary in relation to each other. So the obvious one here would be profit and sales. So now I just get one dot because it's showing me overall what the sales and the profit are. If I do disaggregate, then I'll see dots for every single transaction in my data set, right? Each of these represents only one transaction here. So this is just saying for this particular order, the profit was this and the sales were that right for this particular point. But if I remove aggregate measures, then I can see, for example, how the total sales and the total profit vary by product name. Right? So what which product has the highest total sales, Right. It's this one. And however you see it has negative profit, right? So this one, it looks like it's good on both the profit and the sales. They're both positive.