Show Me and Scatterplots
Show Me
“Show Me” is a handy tool that Tableau provides to quickly change the type of charts you have.
In this website we’re going to walk you through a couple of visualizations: scatter plots, bar charts, line charts, highlight tables, and maps.
Before we build, let’s examine what each of these charts can be used for:
Scatter plots: used to find the relationship between two measures like feet size and height.
Bar charts: the magnus opus of charts. They’re boring but they get the work done. Bar charts are used for comparison. We use single measures to compare across dimensions.
Line charts: these are used to see how a measure changes over time.
Highlight tables: these are crosstabs, which are used to give you a table of your data, but highlight tables use colors to give you more insight into things like highs and lows of your measures values.
Maps: We use maps to identify geographical trends.
In this website, I’ll be moving through the different chart types, and simple details that you can add to it. This way you can get a grasp of how Tableau works with measures and dimensions. Again, really learning the relationship with how Tableau uses measures and dimensions is crucial. If you get it down in the beginning, you’ll be able to learn everything more quickly.
Let’s take a closer look at “Show Me”. If you hover over your desired chart type, you’ll see that you are shown what is needed to build the chart. Hover over scatterplot, and we see that we need at least two measures to build this.
Scatter Plot
Let’s multi-select our two variables. On a PC hold Ctrl and on Mac hold Command as you click each of your variables. When you select your variables, you’ll notice that some of the charts on Show Me un-grey and scatterplot is highlighted with an orange box, meaning that Tableau thinks that a scatterplot would best for these two variables.
- Click on the scatterplot icon in Show Me.
Here we can see that the sum of our sales is plotted against average discount.
See how Tableau automatically aggregates our values into a singular point? We can see that we are only seeing the sum of all sales against the average total discount across all data points in our source.
What do we do if we want to split these measures up to a lower level of detail?
We’ll want to use a dimension. Let’s use Customer Name. So if we want to de-aggregate the data based off of Customer Name how do we do this? We already have two measures in our view. This is where we’ll use our marks card!
- Drag Customer Name to the detail mark.
The detail mark is where you place your dimension in order to split up your measures to that level of detail of Customer Name.
It should be noticed here that Tableau is smart and chooses the best aggregation that it assigns to the measures. See that Sales is aggregated with Sum, but Discount has Average? That’s because if we right click “Discount”, go to “Measure”, and choose “Sum” it’ll show us the total sum of the discounts. Try it. Those are high percentages and doesn’t help us. Average is a way better aggregation to use. You can do the same with Sales if you wish. These are the types of things that would come up if you’re working with a client who wants to see specific answers to questions.
Try building your own scatter plot using some different variables. You can practice playing around with placing different dimensions or measures on the color mark.