Filling in the gaps - what i wish i knew about Tableau

So its been awhile since my last post and I wanted to update what I've been up to since then. We're coming to the end of week 2 of the data school now and having completed 2 days of tableau training, I wanted to spend some time looking back at what I did for my application.

I like most people who came before me and likely all of you data school hopefuls reading this will have learned tableau via YouTube videos and google. Now having done 2 days of formal training learning the software from scratch I wanted to reflect on 2 things I wish I knew during my application process:

1) Sets

So what are sets? Sets are custom fields that define a subset of data based on some conditions. They are labeled with a Venn Diagram. There are three main types of sets but I wont get into too much detail here but will just to give you a use example of what I would have used sets for in my application.

One of the things which I did in my initial application was make bar charts using bins so that I could group data into small neat bar charts instead of having a massive bar chart containing values for every single age. Having learnt about sets instead of grouping this data together I would create a set that showed me the top 10 ages involved in the most accidents. This would let you drill down more into the data instead of aggregating the individual ages into bins.

In order to create a set:

• Right click on the field you want to create a set on
• go to create - set
• go to top and fill in the field information and press ok. REMEMBER to name your set and drag to the filter marker.

Then voilà it should work! sorry about the poor gif quality couldn't figure out how to attach a better quality one. Still learning/getting better at this blogging stuff.

2) Toolbar icons

This might be a no brainer to you guys but I had no idea what some of the toolbar shortcuts do. These would've helped me a lot too.

These 3 icons from left to right pivot your columns with your rows, organize in descending and ascending order respectively.

Hopefully this information helps some of you guys out!