Photo by Gabriele Tirelli / Unsplash
How to format your axes in Tableau.
- Independent Axes
- Include Zero
- Tick Marks
- Headers to the Top
Independent Axes
As per usual I'm using Superstore data and if you are following along, right-click on the ‘Order Date’ field to select Continuous Months and drag it onto Columns, and drag Sub-Category and Profit onto Rows.
What we have here is a series of line charts. Some of them look right, but some are far too flat. They do not really tell a story of what has happened over the years. The reason for that is they have the same range on the axes, -5k to 10k. If you look at the 'Art' or 'Envelopes' Sub-Categories, you'll see the axes do not match. To fix this, simply right-click on the axis and select Edit Axis.
Change the range from Automatic to Independent axis ranges for each row or column. This is very useful when you have more than one chart in a sheet.
Include Zero
For this exercise let's put discrete years on Column, and to measure the number of orders each year, drag Order ID onto rows and right-click and change the measure to Count Distinct.
We can make the value 1000 our basepoint, to get rid of the space we don't need.
Right-click on Axis ->Edit Axis
Untick the box that says 'Include zero'. This gets rid of the whitespace, and starts the value near the first mark.
Tick Marks
Tick Marks can make a big difference to your charts. Let's see where to find them and how they work. I popped Profit onto Rows and Continuous Monthly Order Date onto Columns.
The chart present is a great start, but the Profit Axis may be too frequent. We can easily change that if we right click on the Axis and choose Edit Axis.
Click on Tick Marks and choose Fixed instead of automatic. Tableau knows that "k" means thousand, and will automatically update that.
Let's do that same thing for the Months of Order Date Axis. For Dates it works a bit differently. You have to set the Tick Origin which in our case is going to be the beginning of our data set. I changed the interval to 6 and the Unit to Months, to have a bit more detail on the axis.
Headers to the Top
The last tip for this post is pretty straightforward. As it says in the title I'm going to show you how to bring your headers to the top of your chart.
Tableau automatically put the headers on the bottom, but what if you'd like it under your title?
This is actually not in Edit Axis (what I previously thought!)
To change it, we have to go up to the Analysis tab on the menu bar -->Table Layout --> Advanced
Unclick the "Show innermost level at bottom view..." and click okay. And there you have it!
So, this is it for formatting your axes, I hope it was useful and will help you in the future when you make charts.
Peter Hajnal DS|33