University of St Andrews
Tableau
Cheat Sheet
Gonzalo Gabriel Méndez Uta Hinrichs Miguel A. Nacenta
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Importing Data
1
Click the Text File
option and select the
CSV dataset with the 2
file browser. Your data will be shown
as a table:
3
Go to your newly created
Worksheet by clicking the
orange Sheet 1 tab.
Worksheet Interface
Attributes we want to
Categorical visualize are dropped here
Attributes
Visualizations
will appear here
Marks’ Visual Variables
(and other useful stuff)
Quantitative
Attributes
Columns and Rows Shelves
The Columns shelf creates the columns of a table, while the Rows shelf creates the
rows of a table. You can place any number of fields on these shelves.
Placing a categorical attribute
creates headers for the
Dataset members of that category.
Placing quantitative data
crates numeric axes
Example:
This view shows the members
of the Person category as
column headers, while
the Age attribute is displayed
as a vertical axis.
Adding more attributes to the Rows and Columns shelves adds more
rows, columns, and panes to the table.
Marks
A mark is encodes the data point in the intersection of the dragged attributes.
The inner attributes on the Rows and Columns shelves determine the default
mark type.
Inner attributes
For example, if the
inner attributes are a
categorical and
quantitative one, the
default mark type is a
bar.
Marks’ Shape
You can manually select a different
mark type using the Marks card
drop-down menu. This will set the
mark’s shape property.
Other Visual Properties
You can show additional information about the data using mark properties
such as color, size, labels, etc.
Marks’ properties are controlled by the Marks
card. Here, you can drag attributes to the
different visual properties.
Modifying the marks’ shape
After changing the marks’ type (shape) of our visualization, we end up with this:
1 2
Let’s now play with other properties of this visualization’s marks!
Coloring the marks
Dragging the Person attribute to the
Color property will assign a different
color for each person of the dataset.
A color per
2
person
3 Tableau will tell you that
the attribute Person is
now mapped to the Color
property.
4 And will show you the
mapping it built.
Labelling the marks
Dragging the Age attribute to the
Label property will label each mark
of the visualization with the
corresponding age.
The age is shown
2
in the marks’ labels
3 Tableau will tell you that
the attribute Age is now
used to label the marks.
The Show me Panel
Provides suggestions to build visualizations based on the
attributes you have already dropped.
Tableau automatically evaluates the selected attributes
and suggests you several types of visualization that
would be “appropriate” for those attributes.
Auto-generated Attributes
Sometimes, Tableau automatically creates attributes.
For example, when detecting geographic roles in your data (such as names of
countries or cities), it associates each value in a field with a latitude and longitude
values.
You can use these attributes as numeric values, for
example, to place marks on top of maps.
