This week we started doing Tableau. After two sessions I realized there was so much more I could do for my application. I learnt a lot more then I knew before. This article will be looking particularly at two things.
- How to properly make BANs.
- How to remove pills more efficiently.
To show you what I have learnt I will explain what I did in my original viz. This will be followed by what I would do differently If I were to do it again and how the outcome may have changed.
First lets look at BANs. BANs stand for Big Ass Numbers. These are a great way of displaying important figures very quickly. For my original dashboard I had no idea how to do this, so I just added text boxes to the Dashboard.
Next I just added numbers and changed the colour and made it bigger. However, if the data is updated regularly these figures would have to be changed manually.
To create a BAN, we first must look at the item of interest. For this blog the example I plan to use is to see the top grossing film world wide: as we can see above this film was Avatar which made $2.8 billion worldwide.
To start making a ban properly I first looked at the top 10 grossing films. To get the top 10 I filtered the films. To do this you right click your mouse on film names then press filter then press "top" to change the type of filter and change to top 10 for World Sales. This is shown in pictures below to demonstrate the process.
Now to making a BAN. First we add Film titles to Rows then we add SUM(world sales) to our text button. As I am only interested in the top grossing film - I added a filter.
This then leaves us with the following:
Then I added Film Titles to the Text section in marks so that the film Avatar could be stacked above this.
Now if we click the text button it comes up with ... button which allows you to change the formatting. Where you can change the size, colour, font.
This then creates a BAN- a big Ass Number- I changed the size and colour of the number so it stands out more.
How to move pills more efficiently.
This may seem like an obvious instance. However, when I created my dashboard when I wanted to remove pills I would right click on them and then remove which can be quite time consuming.
However, I was shown that if you just drag it of the screen it removes this with in an instance. This can save a lot of time and make dashboards a lot quicker and this works the same for filters and marks too.
