Adding colors
by Matt Floyd, Ashley Ohmann, Ashutosh Nandeshwar, Jen Stirrup
Tableau: Creating Interactive Data Visualizations
- Tableau: Creating Interactive Data Visualizations
- Table of Contents
- Tableau: Creating Interactive Data Visualizations
- Tableau: Creating Interactive Data Visualizations
- Credits
- Preface
- 1. Module 1
- 1. A Short Dash to Dashboarding!
- 2. Summarizing Your Data for Dashboards
- 3. Interacting with Data for Dashboards
- 4. Using Dashboards to Get Results
- 5. Putting the Dash into Dashboards
- 6. Making Dashboards Relevant
- 7. Visual Best Practices
- 2. Module 2
- 1. Connecting to Data Sources
- Introduction
- Connecting to text files
- Connecting to Excel files
- Connecting to Access databases
- Connecting to a SQL Server
- Pasting from a clipboard
- Connecting to other databases
- Connecting to Windows Azure Marketplace
- Understanding dimensions and measures
- Changing data types
- Applying filters
- Merging multiple data sources
- 2. Creating Univariate Charts
- 3. Creating Bivariate Charts
- 4. Creating Multivariate Charts
- 5. Creating Maps
- 6. Calculating User-defined Fields
- 7. Customizing and Saving
- 8. Exporting and Sharing
- 9. Exploring Advanced Features
- 1. Connecting to Data Sources
- 3. Module 3
- 1. Getting Started with Tableau Public
- 2. Tableau Public Interface Features
- 3. Connecting to Data
- 4. Visualization – Tips and Types
- 5. Calculations
- 6. Level of Detail and Table Calculations
- 7. Dashboard Design and Styling
- 8. Filters and Actions
- 9. Publishing Your Work
- A. Bibliography
- Index
Depending on the type of chart you created, Tableau may or may not color code any data. Using the Color box in the Marks pane, however, you could easily add colors to your graphs.
Let's use the sample file Sample – Superstore Sales (Excel). Open a new worksheet and select Sample – Superstore Sales (Excel) as the data source.
Once the data is loaded on the worksheet, perform the following steps to add colors to encode the data:
- Drag-and-drop Profit from Measures into the Columns shelf.
- Drag-and-drop Sub-Category from Dimensions into the Rows shelf.
- To see the Profit values by Ship Mode, drag-and-drop Ship Mode in the Color box in the Marks pane to generate a chart shown in the following screenshot:
- To see the Profit values by Customer Segment, drag-and-drop Customer Segment in the Color box in the Marks pane.
- To compare Profit and Shipping Cost values, drag-and-drop Shipping Cost in the Color box in the Marks pane to generate a chart shown in the following screenshot. You can see that tables generated a loss and had the highest shipping costs, whereas chairs and chair mats were profitable, though this category incurred the second-highest shipping costs:
When you drag a dimension to the Color box, Tableau automatically selects a color palette to draw colors from, and these colors are very distinctive and use different hues. When you drag a measure to the Color box, however, Tableau selects a gradient of a single color, and bigger data points (larger values) are encoded by a darker gradient, and smaller data points (smaller values) are encoded by a lighter gradient. It is important to note, however, that the underlying value of the dimension or measure also dictates what type of color palette would be chosen: a dimension of a continuous type of data can generate a gradient palette, and a discrete measure can generate a discrete color palette.
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