In analytics in general and Tableau in particular you will work a lot with table. Not only appearing in input & output data, tables could also be used to show detailed values in your viz. Hence, tables should be precise and neatly organized, in order for users to look up and compare information.
Imagine you have a table that looks like this:
At the first glance, the table looks kind of okay. There are Category and Sub-Category of the products, sales in each year and grand total (total of sales) calculated in rows and columns.
But when you look closer, there are several point that could be improve:
1. The order: Category is sorted from Z-A and sales in 2020 in an ascending order. If there is no specific target (for e.g. to look at the products which are best sold in each category), it is always useful to short all the products alphabetically, so they are easy to find.
2. The color: is this a nice choice of light green and blue for header and grand order? Or, is it even necessary to put on a color?
3. Sales value:
- Do we need to put the Dollar unit ($) in front of each single number in the whole table if the currency is identical?
- For the sales, does it help to go until cent (two decimal places?)
- It is harder to read the number when there is no thousand separator, right? (e.g. 12345 instead of 12.345)
- Last but not least, it is also easier for us to read and compare when the number are all right aligned.
4. The font: I did not change the font of this table when I made it in Tableau, but the program somehow put all the sub-category in a lighter color, which makes it harder to look in compared to the rest of the information.
5. The grid: Having grid line everywhere would make the table look so “full”.
Considering and changing all the mentioned point, I have the following table:
Look, compared to my previous table, this one look much neater and easier to look for information. And this is very important, because an organized table is not only used for your audience to look for detail, but also the primary step for you to brainstorm ideas and get inspiration to do the analysis and visualization. They are just small things you might not care about, but when you start to sit down and pay attention to small details, you start to change your whole picture.