3 Moving Beyond Basic Visualizations

You are now ready to set out on your adventure of creating more advanced visualizations! Advanced does not necessarily mean difficult since Tableau makes many visualizations easy to create. Advanced also does not necessarily mean complex. The goal is to communicate the data, not to obscure it in needless complexity.

Instead, these visualizations are advanced in the sense that you will need to understand when they should be used, why they are useful, and how to leverage the capabilities of Tableau to create them. Additionally, many of the examples we will look at will introduce some advanced techniques, such as calculations, to extend the usefulness of foundational visualizations. Many of these techniques will be developed fully in future chapters, so don't worry about trying to absorb every detail right now.

Most of the examples in this chapter are designed so that you can follow along. However, don't simply memorize a set of instructions. Instead, take the time to understand how the combinations of different field types you place on different shelves change the way headers, axes, and marks are rendered. Experiment and even deviate from the instructions from time to time, just to see what else is possible. You can always use Tableau's back button to follow the example again!

In this chapter, visualizations will fall under the following major categories:

• Comparison
• Dates and times
• Relating parts of the data to the whole
• Distributions
• Multiple axes

You may have noticed the lack of a spatial location or geographic category in the preceding list. Mapping was introduced in Chapter 1, Taking Off with Tableau, and we'll get to some advanced geographic capabilities in Chapter 12, Exploring Mapping and Advanced Geospatial Features.

You may recreate the examples that are found in this chapter by using the Chapter 03 Starter.twbx workbook, or even start from scratch by using a blank workbook and connecting to the Hospital Visits.csv file that's located in the Learning Tableau/Chapter 03 folder. The completed examples may be found in the Chapter 03 Complete.twbx workbook.

We will begin by assessing which types of visualizations are effective for quantitative comparisons.