Tableau Your Data!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7 Tips, Tricks, and Timesavers

Mastering the basics of building visualizations and dashboards isn’t difficult or time-consuming. Most people achieve good results without having to spend a lot of time learning the nuances of data visualization or mastering more advanced techniques.

In this chapter, you learn timesaving tips for building views, altering the default formats of fields and axis headers, creating new fields, and customizing the content and appearance of tooltips. I explain a trick for using legends to change the order data in views. After I cover customizing shapes, colors, and fonts, I present useful advanced chart types that demonstrate how to create more advanced chart types that aren’t directly supported using the Show Me menu. The chapter closes with an introduction to some simple methods for creating subtle behavior in dashboards that will set the table for a more extensive treatment of dashboard-building in Chapter 8.

Saving Time and Improving Formatting

There are typically several ways to accomplish desired results in Tableau. Becoming faster at achieving the outcome takes a little practice. Knowing shortcuts that save seconds when you are creating an individual view can add up to hundreds of hours per year. If your team has many people using Tableau, the time savings can be significant.

Double-Click Fields to Build Faster

Double-click any field to quickly create a view or add it to an existing view. If you are working with a file-based data source ...