15 Practical 6: Basic plots in Tableau
During this practical we will continue working with the F1 (demonstration) and Olympics (exercises) data sets used in Practical 4. We will create several different plots shown during lecture 5 and we will see how we can improve them. We will start with a demonstration using the F1 dataset. If you want to follow along you can download the packaged workbook file here
15.1 Exercises
The file required for the exercises can be found here
Exercise 1: Open the tableau packaged workbook file you can find on myplace.
15.2 Creating bar charts and lollipop charts
Now we have our previous session loaded we can start creating some visualisations.
Exercise 2: Create a bar chart which displays the top 15 countries for medal count in 2016 and gives each country a different color.
- Ensure you use context filters before using a top N filter.
For video demonstration click here
As you can see there is a lot to improve from this graph.
Exercise 3: Can you list the aspects you would like to improve in this graph.
Things you may want to improve are:
- Change x and y axis around
- Remove the colour from country this has no added benefit
- Sort the data on number of medals
- Remove the grey background
- Remove y-axis grid lines and x-axis minor grid lines
- Rename the axis
Exercise 4: See if you can make as many of the above changes as possible.
For video demonstration click here
We now have quite a nice looking graph but you could decide to enhance it even further creating a lollipop chart.
For video demonstration click here
15.3 Creating tree maps, bubble charts and word clouds
We can also choose to display the data above in either a tree map, bubble chart, or word cloud.
Exercise 5: Can you create the three charts mentioned above displaying the number of medals in 2016 for the top 10 countries.
For video demonstration click here
For video demonstration click here
For video demonstration click here
15.4 Creating histograms and boxplots
Up until now we have been interested in medal counts, but I would like to start looking at the athlete characteristics a bit more. First I would like to know if their height is normally distributed.
Exercise 6: Create a histogram which shows the distribution of the athletes height in 2016.
Looking at the histogram we can see quite a wide spread of heights across the population of athletes. I wonder if the distribution of heights for males and females differs.
Exercise 7: Create two histograms which shows the distribution of the athletes height in 2016 by sex.
You will see later in the R practical the graphs can be compared to the total group, doing this in Tableau however is not directly possible. We can however display the distribution for the total group in another facet using the analytics tab.
Exercise 8: Add the histogram for the total group to the previously created visualisation.
For video demonstration click here
Next up let’s have a look at box-plots. We have seen height differs between Males and Females but I am wondering if we can use height as a selection method for certain sports.
Exercise 9: Create boxplots which show the distribution of the athletes height in 2016 by sport. Can you order the sports from those with the tallest to shortest athletes?
Exercise 10: Last can you add a median reference line to the boxplot visualisation?
For video demonstration click here
Exercise 11: Save your workbook as a tableau packaged workbook, we will continue making visualisations next week.