Tips – Charts and Dashboards with DataSelf Analytics (Tableau) – Part I (30 mins)

Happy Thursday everyone. Thanks for joining us. We have many things to cover today, so I'm going to jump right into the session. I'm going to be talking about Data Self analytics and covering some basic and popular topics when it comes to building charts and dashboards using our Tableau powered solution. Welcome. My name is Johnny Jurati. I'm Data Self's founder and CEO. So let's go for it again. The idea is to cover very popular charting and dashboarding techniques. These are the main topics I'm going to be covering throughout the presentation. And good news is this session is being recorded and in about a day or so we'll be sending you a link where you can review the concepts that we covered here today. I'm going to try to cover things slowly and telling all the steps that I take and then sure enough, the video should be helpful for you to later to replicate the things that I'm going to be doing. So first of all, this assumes you have some knowledge already on how to use the Data Self analytics desktop client, which is pretty much the same as Tableau desktop. And we're going to be providing as part of the recording also this workbook. So if you want to follow the same techniques using the same workbook that I'm using, you'll be able to download it from, from the Internet tomorrow once we share the folders. So first of all, I'm going to be talking about some basic concepts about charting, how to build charts, and one of the things is this tool has been designed to try to figure out a good way to show you information visually, help you go through this process. So as a starting point, you should try to give it a shot to see if the tool will show you a chart type that will be meaningful for what you're looking for. I'm going to show some examples now. So let's say suppose I want to see sales by date. So just come to my setup panel here and I choose invoice date, I press and hold the control button on my keyboard and I choose sales. So when I see sales and invoice date and when I tell the tool, show me the information in different ways. I want to see which one is going to be informative for my insight. So you come to this show me button, you click on the show me button and the tool will check the fields you have selected in which type of representations, visual representations make sense out of those two fields. Everything that is not highlighted you cannot use. In this case, I'm just going to navigate the potential options that are highlighted, such as just show me the numbers. So right there I see by year total sales. You know, if you want to see numbers by the penny, this might be the way to go. Or if I want to show the next approach and here I cannot see very well. So let me just come in the middle and widen the columns. So in this case it's just show me by year a bigger box. Not very informative in this case. So let me check the next approach. Next approach is also numbers, but using also a color schema to tell which ones are bigger. And you have like a big spreadsheet, a bunch of numbers. You want to see numbers, but you want to spot the trends, the small and the biggest ones. Sometimes this approach is very informative. Let me just give an example. If I come here and I say I want to see this by salesperson and dragging my rows right now, I can easily spot which ones are the biggest or the smallest in sales. Just because the color is helping me visualizing numbers and also using colors as a way to tell biggest and smallest. Okay, that was just this approach, maybe on a pie chart. So right now I have different colors. I see the size of this slice that I can tell how much is growing year over year. Maybe I want to see just bars. So that's pretty straightforward. Maybe I want to see this approach which stacks in a single bar and putting the colors for each one of the years. Maybe I want to see this approach which shows bigger box, in this case bigger sales. And the color also represents bigger sales. So that's another way to look at things. Maybe you want to go for the circles, lines, broken lines. All of these highlighters are different ways you can experiment to see which one will be more insightful. So give it a shot. Just select using the control, holding the control button which fields you want to see and start exploring which one would be more beneficial. In my example here today I'm going to choose the bars and I want to have vertical bars. I'm going to click them to pivot this view. And now I have just sales by year. So let me say this is just simply sales by year. So by the way, I came here, I right clicked, chose rename sheet and it put sales by year. Okay, very simple. Just press and hold with the control button, select different scenarios and see which one is going to work for you. Let me make some other scenarios that can be a little more elaborate. Let me pick some other fields and I'm going to show a little geography analysis that for some people are very important. To see things on a map. So I'm going to choose in this case anything that has a geography component, country, state or province, city, zip code, street, whatever has a geographic component you can put on a map. So let me choose in this example customer state. I'm going to press and hold my control button. Again I'm going to choose company because the sample database is from multi company framework, I'm going to choose sales. So again I just picked those three fields and go to the show me button again. Now typically when you go to show me button it will highlight what is in the tools perception. What is the most likely visualization that could be more meaningful. In this case it's showing me this one. So I'm going to let me pick that one and see if the tool got something nice for me. So when I click that, wow, this is really cool. Let me just make this a little bigger by clicking this plus signal, I'm going to drag to the middle. So what I have here is bigger bubbles, bigger sales and the sales are sliced by the company code. Now these bubbles are kind of a little small for my screen. How can I make things bigger? In your charts, if you're looking at bubbles, lines, if you want to make them bigger, we have these different marks that can help you change what you're looking at. And if you want to see bigger, you go for the size mark, you click on it and it just increase and now you have bigger bubbles. So if you're looking at different representations, sometimes you look at a line you want to see thicker, you're looking at bubbles, you want to see bigger, the size or bars, you're going to make bars wider or thinner. The size button in this mark allows you to change the size of your representation. So I recommend you to explore the size to see if changing the size sometimes will be making cleaner or more visual a better visual representation of what you're trying to see. Okay, so very cool. I just selected state company sales. The tool went there and showed me this is the best representation or the most likely best representation. I clicked and I saw it was awesome. Okay, so very simple. I'm going to call this sales by company and states. So that's my second map. Let's see something new. Let's create a new sheet and in this case I'm just going to simply select customer. I want to see sales and gross profit Again I press and hold the control button on the keyboard, select those three and now maybe I should go for this one. And I look at this. Yeah, I didn't like it, try something else. In this case I'm going to show these bubbles which sometimes are very cool way to look at sizes and different measures. In this case. How can I interpret, how can I read this chart? What does it mean? Well, let's go back to the mark section here to try to see if you can tell me what this is. If I look at this section here, it tells me that this little icon which is related to the size has my sum of sales, meaning the size of my bubbles is proportional to the sales of each of these bubbles. What do I have as this description? The bubbles? I have the customer name. As you can tell, Michaels and so forth are the customers names in the color of the bubbles are the aggregation of the percentage gross profit which has this color schema. So green is profitable, very. Red is not so profitable. So now I was able to see what this representation means by just looking or trying to interpret the information, looking at the marks and seeing of the different components and how they play into this. Again I recommend you to play with these things with the different options in reading what you have here to make sense of what this representation is. Overall it's fairly self explanatory. So give it a shot and if you don't get it, feel free to google for it or give us a shot. We'll be here to help you make sense out of your data. Okay, so let me rename this and call sales and GP percent by customer. So another interesting chart. Let's create more things. Now time analysis is quite often important when you're doing charting out of the solution. So let me show some popular ways to use time and charts. So again we're going to choose invoice, date, press and hold the control button. Choose sales and let's go to the show me in this case, by the way, let me remove my face so you can focus on the session, not necessarily my face. So let's focus more on the presentation here. Let's see, I want to see sales by date on a single line. So in this case let me choose this option here which will give me a single line. And right now by year I see my sales trending. Now typically you may want to drill down to see by quarter, by month, by week, by day, by fiscal period, by you name, by you name it. How can you do that? Typically you can come here, let's say I'm looking at the years and I expand year and I go to the quarter level. So now see a trend line in my whole company history by quarter If I expand, I can go to the month level and I see how I'm growing on a monthly level. If I expand, I go to the week and I can go to the day level. So I can just drill down and see a much more granular approach of what you're doing. In this case, and let me just click back twice to go back to the month level. In this case, I'm looking at my whole company history. Maybe you only want to see this year, last year. And then you could just apply filters to your visualization to just focus on a subsection of the whole thing. Okay, so this case, let me just tell. This is monthly trend, sales trends, sales trend line. So that's a simple report just showing monthly sales trend line. Now, quite often when you're doing months, you want to compare prior periods, prior years or whatnot. Let's take a look at comparison. I'm going to create a new sheet and again I'm going to choose invoice, date, sales amount. But this time I'm going to choose this other kind of chart. So now I have a different approach. What about it? Well, let's expand to the next level. In this case, it's showing, broken down by year, how the quarters are in each year. If I expand to the month level now, for every quarter, I see how the months are going instead of each quarter. Now, maybe this approach per se is not that valuable. It's a little bit. I don't like it. But what if I want to see by year, by month? I don't want to have the quarter breaking down. I can come to the quarter here and I just drag it out, just drag it out of the view. And now let me put this on a fit width so the whole visualization fits in my screen. This is sometimes very handy, choosing between these different options. Right now I chose fit width. So right now I'm looking per year how my sales trend is going. So now I have a little bit of way to compare years with, you know, how is it growing or not. But quite often when I see on a single, you know, January through December, all years together, not in four different, you know, panels here. How can I do that? Look at this. I'm going to take the year from the columns. I'm going to drag it into my color. N bang, look at that. Now you have the months, and for every year you have a different curve. And now you can have a much better representation of how you're growing or how you're doing year over year. Very simple, but very insightful. So let me call this year over year lines. Cool, huh? Well, sometimes you want to do other kind of time comparisons. So let's create another report in this case again, I'm going to choose invoice, date and sales. And now I'm going to choose bars. So now I have bars and let me put them vertical. So I'm going to pivot them to have them vertical. And I'm going to show some very cool ways to see how you're doing quarter versus quarter, month versus month. Kind of different seasonality year over year, for instance. So I just have total sales by year. Now I'm going to drag the invoice date into my filters area and I'm going to choose months. Go to next. I want to see all months and click ok. And I'm going to put. Now by clicking on this little arrow, I'm going to choose show quick filter. So far I have done nothing but just added a filter to this report. I'm still seeing full year's sales in the four different years of my sample database. Now look at this. If I uncheck all the months and I only choose September, what do I get now? Well, actually now this is showing how my sales in September were for the past four years. Very insightful. Sometimes you want to see if you're growing month over month in different years, maybe quarters. If you want to see by quarter, you could have built a quarter filter. Or here you can just select July and August and September. Now you have the third quarter comparison between those three different years. Maybe the way that you look at your seasonality is maybe September and October or maybe September and November is a very important season in your business right now what I'm doing here, I'm comparing just the two months sales across the four years. So very simple way to see seasonality across different years. Maybe I could be looking at different quarters and seeing seasonality. Is the first month of every quarter stronger for the past five quarters or whatnot. You can build those queries using this kind of technique. Now when you're doing this quite often when I see actually growth along with the sales, how can I see. In this case you could be looking at expenses or quantity on hand and whatnot. But in this case, sales. How can I see growth in sales together? Well, this is a bit more sophisticated but it's really, really insightful. So when I convert the sales, actually the change since last year comparing only whatever the filter has. So if I come to this pill, I click this arrow down and I choose quick table Calculation and I choose difference. Now this is the sales change since last year. So I grew in those two years and I declined. Is it true? Is that happening really? How can I see sales and the growth together? Well, I'm going to take sales now and drag sales to my rows right before here in this case. So this is sales and this is difference in sales. As you can tell, you grew, you grew and you declined by this much. So very insightful. Now I have both of them together. Well, what if I take the difference in sales and I change the representation from bar to circles? So this little dropdown is a way that you can change the format of your representation. And because I selected here and I change this, now I'm putting this as circles. If I want to change this one, I click. And now let's say I would select bar, for instance. I'm sorry, area or bars. I can change the format by clicking here and selecting a different format. Okay, now let me take this now and put them on a dual axis. How can I put them on a dual axis? And what does that mean? I'm going to come here to the second of these measures, click the dropdown and choose dual axis. And look at that. Now I have my bars, which is for sales, and my difference in sales, which are the dots. And I can see how things are going now. Sales is on this axis and difference on the right axis. They have different scale. What if I want to have both on the same scale? I can just right click on one of these axis, choose edit axis, choose synchronize dual axis. And now when I do that, both axes have the same scale. So I no longer need both of them. I can right click and say, don't show me this remove. And now it's a cleaner representation. This kind of chart is very insightful. I recommend you come back to this and experimenting because it can be very, very helpful for your analysis of different seasons, how much you're having and how much you're growing year over year. So let me change this to year over year growth. All right, let me go back to the. Let me see the trend line here. And what if I want to see a different color representing a different meas? So this is showing sales by month. What if I want to see how gross profit were without putting more information on this chart? Well, I could take gross profit here and I just drag to my color mark. And right now I have this color representation telling how my gross profit is. So visually I can tell how things are doing. And in this case, my profitability is 34 to 56%. Suppose in my business, you know, 34 is low. So I can come here and say let's change how the color is represented. I'm going to click edit colors and then I'm going to choose from automatic to red to green and I click ok. So in this case, you know, the lower is going to be red, the upper is going to be green and I can see that over my profitability is not doing so well comparing to maybe to my targets within this range. So just by adding a second measure to my colors and editing how the measure is colored, you can also have very insightful information into your trend analysis. Now maybe you want to add labels to your reports. You want to see the numbers per se. How can you see the numbers? Well, one is if you put the mouse over, you can see all the information that you added to the query, but you can also just drag them. If I take sales and I drag to my label mark, now I have sales all over the place. Maybe I also want to put gross profit. I drag gross profit to my label. Now I have sales and gross profit. Maybe this is a little bit too cluttered. I don't want to have sales. I only have gross profit. So I can drag sales out of this list. And now I only have gross profit. So very easy to just drag and drop and add labels to whatever bars, maps and whatnot. Okay, let me go back to the, to the map here. This map is showing just in this case, total sales by state, by company. What I want to see trend over time? Well, I can, let's say take invoice, date and maybe drag to my columns. So by year I see what's going on. It's kind of a little cluttered. I didn't like it. Maybe I put in my rows. So the same idea, a little cluttered. Sometimes it's valuable. Or I can also drop into pages and let me just add. I'm going to right click on the map, choose annotate, go to area. I'm going to insert the page name and make it a little bigger. And I'm going to make this bigger over here. What is this about? Well, now I have this little section here that I can just scroll this cursor and I see how sales is changing by year in a single page. And I can even click on this arrow down and say loop playback. I press play and then the numbers change. Very cool, isn't it? All right, so these are some of the popular charting capabilities. Let me show now how to put this on a dashboard. So instead of clicking this button which adds a new sheet, I'm going to click this button which adds a new dashboard. So I'm going to create a dashboard now. And overall in dashboards you can just drag and drop things into the dashboard. So let's say I want to put the mouse over the existing queries that I just created and suppose I want to add the map. So drag and drop the first one anywhere. You get whatever you have into the dashboard. Then let's say I want to add this monthly trend line. I just drag it and here I would put on the left panel, if I go to the top, is the top right bottom. Just choose an area, drag and drop. And now at the bottom I have the trend line. Well let's add maybe the year over year growth. So just drag and drop. Drag do be on the left, the very top, the right, the bottom, Anywhere you drag and drop and you see where this query will take place, I'm going to put it right here and then you can just change the layout. Maybe you want to make this smaller on the right size and this looks much cleaner. You have different ways of changing the layout. Let's say, hey, this particular label only applies to my map. I can come over here, click on it and then click this arrow pointing down and say floating. Now this is a floating label. I can just drag input on my map. Much cleaner and nicer. Now how can we filter this dashboard? So for instance, right now this particular filter only applies to this particular quadrant. Now if I change it here, it's only changing this particular quadrant. What if I want to get this filter to apply to the whole dashboard? Well, click on this filter, click the arrow point down, choose apply to worksheets. And here right now it's only applying to that particular worksheet. You could say which worksheets I want to apply to or all using this particular data source. In this case I'm going to choose all. Now what happens is as I check or uncheck, you can see it's affecting the whole map, the whole query or the whole dashboard. So you can take any filter that you have applied that is here, come and apply to different parts of the dashboard and it will work. You can also use the dashboard to filter others, some quadrants to control other quadrants. So if I come over here right now for instance, and I select a few states, nothing happens with the rest because it's just highlighting some states here. However, if I come to this drop down list and I choose use filter, this Means that now this quadrant will work as a filter for everything else. So if now I come and I choose a few states, look what's going to happen with the bottom part. When I release my mouse, it changed. So now I can control my dashboard just by selecting pieces of this. And maybe let's say I want to come over here and do the same thing with this part I want to use as a filter. And now if I choose 2015, it will only show 2015 data. So that's different ways to filter. By selecting filters and getting rise to everything. You got to click on the filter area to have the little arrow point down to select this option. By the same token, you got to click on a quadrant to have this little arrow so you can control and tell what it can be done. Also, as you notice, each quadrant is named with the same name of the tab. If you want to give a name to the dashboard, you come to dashboard and you choose show title and then you can come to that dashboard here and change the title. I'm going to call my dashboard. So now it's called my dashboard. And let's say you want to make this dashboard available on the Internet on the web browser. You go to your server, you click Publish workbook and then click none. I just want to publish my one dashboard and I publish it. So I'm going to click yes. Now we're sending this dashboard to my web server and when I go to my web server and I refresh my views and it could be using my iPad. Now I have my one dashboard and if I click on it, I get it right there. Folks, I hope you have found this session informative. We're just finishing our 30 minutes training. Again, this will be made a recording available and if you have more questions or more information, please feel free to call us. Another thing that I want to let you know because it may be helpful for you if you go to our website and go to the webinars. I'm sorry, to the training videos. You can find here some informative trainings showing you how to do different things. This is the third webinar specific we did for our client base. We already covered filtering in the past, how to build calculated measures. And now we're going to be adding to this list also today's webinar. Thank you very much. I hope you found it informative. Have a happy Thursday. Thank you.