Tableau data visualization: Create your first Tableau visualization!

Key Takeaways

alrights excellent it is time to continue our adventure in tableau in this lesson we'll create our first visualization and it is going to be awesome ready let's get right into it then as you can see the workspace area is empty right now we've already loaded the GDP data file and we can see that here actually let's open the GDP data excel file for a second I want to make sure you are familiar with its structure here it is we have a few blank rows but tableau took care of them then we have a column with country names a column indicating that this is GDP data and several columns with GDP figures for each of these countries and this is the data sheet we are using right now perfect let's go back to tableau the way data is organized here is rather interesting our attention should be focused on the dimensions and measures part of the screen first off we notice that tableau has been very smart and managed to organize our data categorical variables are right here under dimensions while numerical data such as the country's actual GDP is under measures dimensions have been colored in blue and measures are in green okay another important remark we have to make is that some of the fields we see here are in italics and others aren't the distinction between the two is that tableau generates certain fields based on the data it finds when tableau generates its own fields such as the measure names field we see here these are fields that are not contained in our original data source but tableau deems that these can be useful and creates them for us this same thing is true for latitude/longitude number of Records and measure values we see in green under measures the rest of the fields written without italics are ones we saw in the excel file we loaded country name indicator name and the years from 2002 to 2016 where we have countries GDP figures good another important detail I would like to mention is that tableau adds an icon right next to each of the fields we have under dimensions and measures this is what allows us to understand how tableau reads the data the first field under dimensions is country name and its icon is the globe tableau recognizes that this field is related to actual countries and it is ready to help us out when we need to visualize such data if I click on the icon I'll be able to see that this is a string and that its geographic role is of country region as it should be at the same time the tiny ABC icon of the indicator name field shows us that this is a text value and in fact when I click on it I can see that this is a string but different to what we have for the country name field the geographic role of indicator name is none that's because this is purely a text value what about the year measures we have below well these are numerical values right therefore it comes as no surprise that when we click on their icon designating numerical values we will see these are numbers okay perfect let's do the following I'll drag the country name field into the workspace area and boom tableau created a world map that shows us the location of each of the countries we have in our data source it is quite interesting to see that the field we see under columns and rows isn't country name but our artificially generated longitude and latitude fields at first it may seem strange but then when you think about it it is intuitive tableau understands country name is a geographical field this is why it will do much more than simply create a row or a column containing a list of the countries we have in the excel file know the program is smarter than that it reads the country names and then creates the two fields longitude and latitude in order to map each country geographically and hence the beautiful map we have here now if I drag the year 2016 in the map tableau will update the chart adding the 2016 GDP of each country we can see that happened if we hover above each of the dots we have representing the countries on our map see the US GDP for 2016 was more than 18 trillion dollars while Canada's GDP was around 1.5 trillion dollars okay perfect everything's good our first visualization in tableau is almost ready one last finishing touch I would like to add is to enlarge the bubbles a bit indicating how large countries GDP is to do that I can work with the newly appeared some 2016 pane on the right side of the screen I'll click on its tiny arrow and we'll select edit sizes the Edit sizes dialog box allows me to enlarge the bubbles we see in the visualization I think this will do let's click apply and as you see the bubbles in the visualization in this makes it a bit easier to compare the GDP of different countries the final touch will be to edit the name of this visualization I'll double click here and simply type a title anything is better than sheet 1 that's why I'll simply type GDP per country comparison and here we are that's our first visualization in tableau and we are just getting started