Create 15 Charts in 15 Minutes

Sometimes when we learn a new tool like Tableau, we just need to see a variety of examples fast to get a good grasp of it.

In this tutorial, we will create 15 (plus one) charts in 15 minutes. What I want to note in this tutorial is that we will build the charts from the ground up, without using Show Me.

In this video, we create:

1. Bar Chart

2. Line Chart

3. Area Chart

4. Scatter Plot

5. Pie Chart

6. Maps (both symbol map and filled map/chloropleth map)

7. Text Table (or crosstab)

8. Heat Map

9. Highlight Table

10. Tree Map

11. Bubble Chart (or Packed Bubble)

12. Box and Whisker Plot

13. Histogram

14. Bullet Chart

15. Gantt Chart

16. Word Cloud

Tableau supports a tools called Show Me that quickly generates a series of charts based on fields you select from the side bar.

While Show Me helps in cycling through charts fast, using and relying on it can become a crutch because a lot of what it does is “automatic”. If something does not look like how we want it to be, we will spend more time reverse engineering and figuring out how to undo what Show Me has done.

Hope this was helpful. Happy Tableau’ing!