Tutorial: Get Started with Tableau Introduction / Overview Suppose you are an employee for a large retail chain

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Tutorial: Get Started with Tableau

Introduction / Overview

Suppose you are an employee for a large retail chain. Your manager just got the quarterly sales report, and noticed that sales seem better for some products than for others and profit in some areas is not doing as well as she had expected. Your boss is interested in the bottom line: It's your job to look at overall sales and profitability to see if you can find out what's driving these numbers.

You'll use Tableau Desktop to build a simple view of your product data, map product sales and profitability by region, build a dashboard of your findings, and then create a story to present.

Step 1: Connect to your data

Open Tableau Desktop and begin

In the Connect pane, under Saved Data Sources, click on Sample - Superstore to connect to the sample data set.

The Sample - Superstore data set comes with Tableau. It contains information about products, sales, profits, and so on that you can use to identify key areas for improvement within this fictitious company.

Step 2: Drag and drop to take a first look

Create a view

You set out to identify key areas for improvement, but where to start? With four years' worth of data, you decide to drill into the overall sales data between 2017 and 2020 to see what you find. Start by creating a simple chart.

From Dimensions in the Data pane, drag Order Date to the Columns shelf.

Note: When you drag Order Date to the columns shelf, Tableau creates a column for each year in your data set. Under each column is an Abc indicator. This indicates that you can drag text or numerical data here, like what you might see in an Excel spreadsheet.

From Measures, drag Sales to the Rows shelf.

Tableau generates a chart with sales rolled up as a sum (aggregated). You can see total aggregated sales for each year by order date.

Any time you create a view that includes time (in this case Order Date), Tableau generates a line chart.

This line chart shows that sales look pretty good and seem to be increasing over time. This is good information, but it doesn't really tell you much about which products have the strongest sales and if there are some products that might be performing better than others. Since you just got started, you decide to explore further and see what else you can find out.

 

Refine your view

To gain more insight into which products drive overall sales, try adding more data. Start by adding the product categories to look at sales totals in a different way.

From Dimensions, drag Category (in the Product folder) to the Columns shelf and place it to the right of YEAR(Order Date).

Your view updates to a bar chart which is doing a great job showing sales by category—furniture, office supplies, and technology.

From this view, you can see that sales for office supplies is growing faster than sales for furniture, even though furniture had a really good year in 2017. Perhaps you can recommend that your company focus sales efforts on furniture instead of office supplies? Your company sells a lot of different products in those categories, so you'll need more information before you can make a recommendation.

To help answer that question, you decide to look at products by sub-category to see which items are the big sellers. For example, for the Furniture category, you want to see details about bookcases, chairs, furnishings, and tables. Looking at this data might help you gain insights into sales and later on, overall profitability, so add sub-categories to your bar chart.

Drag the Sub-Category dimension to the Columns shelf.

Sub-Category is another discrete field. It creates another header at the bottom of the view, and shows a bar for each sub-category (68 marks) broken down by category and year.

 

Step 3: Focus your results

Filters and colors are ways you can add more focus to the details that interest you. After you add focus to your data, you can begin to use other Tableau Desktop features to interact with that data.

 

Add filters to your view

You can use filters to include or exclude values in your view. In this example, you decide to add two simple filters to your worksheet to make it easier to look at product sales by sub-category for a specific year.

In the Data pane, under Dimensions, right-click Order Date and select Show Filter.

Repeat the step above for the Sub-Category field.

The filters are added to the right-hand side of your view in the order that you selected them. Filters are card types and can be moved around on the canvas by clicking on the filter and dragging it to another location in the view. As you drag the filter, a dark black line appears, showing you where you can drop the filter to move it.

 

Add colour to your view

Currently, you are looking at sales totals for your various products. You can definitely see that some products have consistently low sales, and might be good candidates for reducing sales efforts for those product lines, but what does overall profitability look like for your different products? You decide to drag Profit to colour to see what happens.

From Measures, drag Profit to Colour on the Marks card.

By dragging profit to colour you now see that you have negative profit in Tables, Bookcases, and even Machines.

 

Find key insights

The next step is to interact with your view so that you can begin drawing conclusions. Looking at your view, you saw that you definitely had some unprofitable products, but now you want to see if these products have been unprofitable year over year.

Time to use your filters to take a closer look.

In the view, in the Sub-Category filter card, clear all of the check boxes except Bookcases, Machines, and Tables.

Now you can see that, in some years, Bookcases and Machines were actually profitable. However, in 2020, Machines became unprofitable. While you've made an important discovery, you want to gather more information before proposing any action items to your boss.

 

On a hunch, you decide to break up your view by region:

Select All in the Sub-Category filter card to show all sub-categories again.

From Dimensions, drag Region (from the Location folder) to the Rows shelf and place it to the left of Sum(Sales).

Tableau creates a view with multiple axes broken down by region.

 

Now you see sales and profitability by product for each region.

In the view, in the Sub-Category filter card, clear all of the check boxes except Machines.

By adding region to the view, you notice that machines in the South are reporting a higher negative profit overall than in your other regions.

 

Select All in the Sub-Category filter card to show all sub-categories again, name the worksheet “Sales by Product/Region”, and add a title.

You choose to focus your analysis on the South, but you don't want to lose the view you've created. In Tableau Desktop, you can duplicate your worksheet to continue where you left off.

In your workbook, right-click the Sales by Product/Region sheet and select Duplicate.

Rename the duplicated sheet to Sales in the South.

In your new worksheet, from Dimensions, drag Region to the Filters shelf to add it as a filter in the view.

In the Filter Region dialog box, clear all check boxes except South and then click OK.

Now you can focus on sales and profit in the South. You immediately see that machine sales had negative profit in 2017 and again in 2020. This is definitely something to investigate!

Save your work by selecting File > Save As. Give your workbook a name, like Regional Sales and Profits.

Step 4: Explore your data geographically

You've built a great view that allows you to review sales and profits by product between 2016 and 2019. And after looking at product sales and profitability in the South, you decide to look for trends or patterns in that region.

Since you're looking at geographic data (the Region field), you have the option to build a map view. Map views are great for displaying and analysing this kind of information.

For this example, Tableau has already assigned the proper geographic roles to the Country, State, City, and Postal Code fields. That's because it recognized that each of those fields contained geographic data. You can get to work creating your map view right away.

Click the New worksheet icon at the bottom of the workspace.

In the Data pane, double-click State to add it to Detail on the Marks card.

Since Tableau already knows that state names are geographic data, and because the State dimension is assigned the State/Province geographic role, Tableau automatically creates a map view.

Notice that the Country field is also added to the view. This happens because the geographic fields in Sample - Superstore are part of a hierarchy. Each level in the hierarchy is added as a level of detail, like layers of an onion.

Additionally, Latitude and Longitude fields are added to the Columns and Rows shelves. You can think of these as X and Y fields. They're essential any time you want to create a map view, because each location in your data is assigned a latitudinal and longitudinal value. Sometimes the Latitude and Longitude fields are generated by Tableau. Other times, you might have to manually include them in your data.

Drag Region to the Filters shelf, and then filter down to the South only. The map view zooms in to the South region, and there is a mark for each state (11 total).

Now you want to actually see how your data shapes up for this region, so you start to drag other fields to the Marks card:

Drag the Sales measure to Colour on the Marks card.

Click Colour on the Marks card and select Edit Colours. In the Palette drop-down list, select Red-Green Diverging and click OK.

 

 

Are sales in some of those states really that terrible, or are there just more people in Florida looking to buy your products? Maybe you have smaller or fewer stores in the states that appear red. Or maybe there’s a higher population density in the states that appear green, so there’s just more people to buy your stuff.

Either way, there’s no way you want to show this view to your boss because you aren't confident the data is telling a useful story.

Click the Undo icon in the toolbar to return to that nice, blue view.

 

However, have any of the states in the South been profitable?

Drag Profit to Colour on the Marks card to see if you can answer this question.

It’s now clear that Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida have negative profit, even though it appeared they were doing okay—even great—in Sales.

Step 5: Drill down into the details

As you saw in the last step, maps are great for visualizing your data broadly. A bar chart will help you get into the nitty-gritty. To do this, you create another worksheet.

Double-click Sheet 3 and name the worksheet Profit Map.

Right-click Profit Map at the bottom of the workspace and select Duplicate. Name this one Negative Profit Bar Chart.

In the Negative Profit Bar Chart worksheet, click Show Me, and then select horizontal bars.

 

Multi-select the bars on the left by clicking and dragging your cursor across the bars between Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida. On the tooltip that appears, select Keep Only to focus on those three states.

Note: You can also right-click one of the highlighted bars, and select Keep Only.

 

Now you want to look at the data for the cities in these states.

On the Rows shelf, click the plus icon on the State field to drill-down to the City level of detail.

There’s almost too much information here, so you decide to filter the view down to the cities with the most negative profit. How will you do this? With a Top N Filter.

 

Create a Top N Filter

You can use a Top N Filter in Tableau Desktop to set a limit to the number of marks displayed in your view. In this case, you want to use the Top N Filter to hone in on poor performers.

From the Data pane, drag City to the Filters shelf.

In the Filter dialog box, select the Top tab, and then do the following:

Click By field.

Click the Top drop-down and select Bottom to reveal the poorest performers.

Type 5 in the text box to show the bottom 5 performers in your data set.

 

Note: you will be looking at an empty chart right now – this is okay. Just continue with the next steps.

 

Tableau Desktop has already selected a field (Profit) and aggregation (Sum) for the Top N Filter based on the fields in your view. These settings ensure that your view will display only the five poorest performing cities by sum of profit.

You can now see that Jacksonville and Miami, Florida; Burlington, North Carolina; and Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee are the poorest performing cities by profit.

There is one other mark in the view—Jacksonville, North Carolina—that doesn't belong, because sales in that city are actually profitable. Impostor!

What is going on here? Why would a city with a positive profit show up in the view when you created a filter that was supposed to filter it out?

That's a great question, and a great reason to introduce the Tableau Order of Operations. The Tableau Order of Operations, also known as the query pipeline, is the order that Tableau performs various actions, such as the order in which it applies your filters to the view.

Tableau applies filters in the following order:

1. Extract Filters
2. Data Source Filters
3. Context Filters
4. Top N Filters
5. Dimension Filters
6. Measure Filters

The order in which you create filters, or arrange them on the Filters shelf has nothing to do with the order in which Tableau applies those filters to your view.

The good news is you can tell Tableau to change this order when you notice something strange happening with the filters in your view, like with the imposter, Jacksonville, Carolina in your view right now. All you need to do is add a filter to context. This will tell Tableau to filter that field first, regardless of where it falls on the order of operations.

But which field do you add to context? There are three fields on the Filters shelf: Region (a dimension filter), City (a top N filter), and Inclusions (Country, State) (Country, State) (a set).

On the Filters shelf, right-click the City field and select Add to Context.

The City field turns grey and moves to the top of the Filters shelf, but nothing changes in the view. So even though you're forcing Tableau to filter City first, the issue doesn't resolve itself.

Click Undo.

On the Filters shelf, right-click the Inclusions (Country, State) (Country, State) set and select Add to Context.

 

The Inclusions (Country, State) (Country, State) set turns grey and moves to the top of the Filters shelf. Another mark appears in the view! Concord, North Carolina. You also notice that Miami, Florida disappeared. That's because Concord actually had lower profit than Miami, but the way the filters were being applied, it was not included.

 

You're on to something! But Jacksonville, North Carolina is still in the view. So now what's going on?

 

Jacksonville, NC is included because City is the lowest level of detail shown in the view. For Tableau Desktop to know the difference between Jacksonville, NC, and Jacksonville, FL, you need to drill down to the next level of detail in the location hierarchy, which, in this case, is Postal Code. After you do this, you can exclude Jacksonville in North Carolina without also excluding Jacksonville in Florida.

On the Rows shelf, click the plus icon on City to drill down to the Postal Code level of detail.

Right-click the postal code for Jacksonville, NC, 28540, and then select Exclude.

Drag Postal Code off the Rows shelf.

 

Now that you've focused your view to the least profitable cities, you can investigate further to identify the products responsible.

 

Identify the troublemakers

You decide to break up the view by Sub-Category to identify the products dragging profit down. You know that the Sub-Category field contains information about products sold by location, so you start there.

Drag Sub-Category to the Rows shelf, and place it to the right of City.

Drag Profit to Colour on the Marks card to make it easier to see which products have negative profit.

In the Data pane, right-click Order Date and select Show Filter.

 

You can now explore negative profits for each year if you want, and quickly spot the products that are losing money.

Machines, Tables, and Binders don’t seem to be doing well. So what if you stop selling those items in Jacksonville, Concord, Burlington, Knoxville, and Memphis?

 

Verify your findings

Will eliminating binders, machines, and tables improve profits in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee? To find out, you can filter out the problem products to see what happens.

Go back to your map view by clicking the Profit Map sheet tab.

On the Data pane, right-click Sub-Category and select Show Filter.

 

A filter card for all of the products you offer appears next to the map view. This will come in handy in just a second.

From Measures, drag Profit and Profit Ratio to Label on the Marks card.

Now you can see the exact profit of each state without having to hover your cursor over them.

On the Data pane, right-click Order Date and select Show Filter to provide some context for the view.

A filter card for YEAR(Order Date) appears in the view. You can now view profit for all years or for a combination of years. This might be useful for your presentation.

Clear Binders, Machines, and Tables from the list on the Sub-Category filter card in the view.

Recall that adding filters to your view lets you include and exclude values to highlight certain parts of your data.

As you clear each member, the profit for Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida improve, until finally, each has a positive profit.

 

Binders, machines, and tables are definitely responsible for the losses in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida, but not for the rest of the South. For example, if you toggle Binders on the Sub-Category filter card, profit drops by four percent in Arkansas.

 

You want to share this discovery with the team by walking them through the same steps you took.

Select (All) on the Sub-Category filter card to include all products again.

 

Now you know that machines, tables, and binders are problematic products for your company. In focusing on the South, you see that these products have varying impact on profit. This might be a worthwhile conversation to have with your boss.

 

Step 6: Build a dashboard to show your insights

You’ve created four worksheets, and they're communicating important information that your boss needs to know. Now you need a way to say, "Hey, here’s the deal. See how we've got negative profit in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida? This is one of the reasons why."

Tableau has an app for that, or at least a sheet: It's called a dashboard. You can use dashboards to display multiple worksheets at once, and—if you want—make them interact with one another.

 

Set up your dashboard

Click the New dashboard button.

From the Dashboard pane on the left, drag Sales in the South to your empty dashboard.

Drag Profit Map to your dashboard, and drop it on top of the Sales in the South view.

 

Arrange your dashboard

It's not easy to see details for each item in Sub-Category from your Sales in the South bar chart. Plus, because we have the map in view, we probably don't need the South region column in Sales in the South, either.

On Sales in the South, right-click in the column area under the Region column header, and clear Show header.

Repeat this process for the Category row header.

Right-click the Profit Map title and select Hide Title.

Repeat this step for the Sales in the South view title.

Select the first Sub-Category filter card on the right side of your view, and at the top of the card, click the Remove icon.

Repeat this step for the second Sub-Category filter card and one of the Year of Order Date filter cards.

Click on the Profit colour legend and drag it from the right to below Sales in the South.

Finally, select the remaining Year of Order Date filter, click its drop-down arrow, and then select Floating. Move it to the white space in the map view. In this example, it is placed just off the East Coast, in the Atlantic Ocean.

Click the drop-down arrow at the top of the Year of Order Date filter, and select Single Value (Slider).

 

That's more like it! Now, you can easily compare profit and sales by year. But that’s not so different from a couple pictures in PowerPoint—and you're using Tableau.

 

Add interactivity

Wouldn't it be great if you could view which sub-categories are profitable in specific states?

Select Profit Map in the dashboard and click the Use as filter icon in the upper right-hand corner.

Select a state within the map.

 

The Sales in the South bar chart automatically updates to show just the sub-category sales in the selected state. You can quickly see which sub-categories are profitable.

Click outside of the U.S. to clear your selection.

 

You also want viewers to be able to see the change in profits based on the order date.

 

Select the Year of Order Date filter, click its drop-down arrow, and select Apply to Worksheets > Selected Worksheets.

In the Apply Filter to Worksheets dialog box, select All in dashboard, and then click OK.

 

This option tells Tableau to apply the filter to all worksheets in the dashboard that use this same data source.

 

Rename and go

You show your boss your dashboard, and she loves it. She's named it "Regional Sales and Profit," and you do the same by double-clicking the Dashboard 1 tab and typing Regional Sales and Profit.

In her investigations, your boss also finds that the decision to introduce machines in the North Carolina market in 2020 was a bad idea.

Your boss is glad she has this dashboard to explore with, but she also wants you to present a clear action plan to the larger team. You're tasked with creating a PowerPoint with your findings.

 

Step 7: Build a story to present

You want to share your findings with the larger team. Together, you might re-evaluate selling machines in North Carolina.

Instead of having to guess which key insights your team is interested in, and including them in a PowerPoint presentation, you decide to create a story in Tableau. This way, you can walk viewers through your data discovery process, and you have the option to interactively explore your data to answer any questions that come up during your presentation.

 

Create your first story point

For the presentation, you'll start with an overview.

Click the New story button.

 

You're presented with a blank workspace that reads, "Drag a sheet here." This is where you'll create your first story point.

From the Story pane on the left, drag the Sales in the South worksheet onto your view.

Add a caption—maybe "Sales and profit by year"—by editing the text in the grey box above the worksheet.

 

This story point will be a useful way to acquaint viewers with your data. But you want to tell a story about selling machines in North Carolina, so it's time to take a step in that direction.

 

Highlight machine sales

To bring machines into the picture, you can leverage the Sub-Category filter included in your Sales in the South bar chart.

In the Story pane, click Duplicate to duplicate the first caption.

Since you know you’re telling a story about machines, on the Sub-Category filter, clear the selection for (All), then select Machines.

 

Now your viewers can quickly identify the sales and profit of machines by year.

Add a caption to underscore what your viewers see, for example, "Machine sales and profit by year."

 

You've successfully shifted the focus to machines, but you realize that something seems odd: In this view, you can't single out which state is contributing to the loss.

You'll address this in your next story point by introducing your map.

In the Story pane, select Blank.

 

Make your point

The bottom line is that machines in NC lose your company money. You discovered that in the dashboard you created. Looking at overall sales and profit by year doesn't demonstrate this point alone, but regional profit can.

Drag your dashboard Regional Sales and Profit onto the canvas.

 

This gives viewers a new perspective on your data: Negative profit catches the eye.

Add a caption like, "Underperforming items in the South."

 

To narrow your results to just North Carolina, start with a duplicate story point.

Select Duplicate to create another story point with your Regional Profit dashboard.

Select North Carolina on the map and notice that the bar chart automatically updates.

Select All on the Year of Order Date filter card.

Add a caption, for example, "Profit in NC, 2017-2020."

 

Now you can walk viewers through profit changes by year in North Carolina. To do this, you will create four story points:

Select Duplicate to begin with your Regional Profit dashboard focused on North Carolina.

On the Year of Order Date filter, click the right arrow button so that 2017 appears.

Add a caption, for example, "Profit in NC, 2017," and then click Duplicate.

Repeat steps 2 and 3 for years 2018, 2019, and 2020.

 

Now viewers will have an idea of which products were introduced to the North Carolina market when, and how poorly they performed.

Finishing touches

On this story point, which focuses on data from 2020, you want to describe your findings. A caption simply won't do.

In the left-hand pane, select Drag to add text and drag it onto your view.

Enter a description for your dashboard that emphasizes the poor performance of machines in North Carolina, for example, "Introducing machines to the NC market in 2020 resulted in losing a significant amount of money."

 

For dramatic effect, you'll probably hover over Machines on the Sales in the South bar chart while presenting to show a useful tooltip: the loss of nearly $4,000.

 

And now, for the final slide, you drill down into the details.

In the Story pane, click Blank.

From the Story pane, drag Negative Profit Bar Chart to the view.

In the Year of Order Date filter card, narrow the view down to 2020 only.

 

You can now easily see that the loss of machine profits was solely from Burlington, NC.

In the view, right-click the Burlington mark (the bar) and select Annotate > Mark.

In the Edit Annotation dialog box that appears, delete the filler text and type: "Machines in Burlington lost nearly $4,000 in 2020."

Click OK.

In the view, click the annotation and drag it to adjust where if appears.

Give this story point the caption: "Where are we losing machine profits in NC?"

Double-click the Story 1tab and rename your story to "Improve Profits in the South".

Review your story by selecting Window > Presentation mode.