The quickest way for a beginner to start creating visualizations in Tableau is to use the Show Me menu, which will showcase a range of ready-made charts and the combinations of Dimensions and Measures you will need to create Figure 4.2:
Figure 4.2: A beginner’s guide: Explore Tableau’s Show Me menu for effortless chart creation
For example, to answer a question like who my largest customer is, you can select Account Name, hold CTRL, and select Annual Revenue, then click on Horizontal Bars in the Show Me menu, as shown in Figure 4.3:
Figure 4.3: Selecting account name and annual revenue, then choose horizontal bars
Tableau will recommend which chart to use with a border. This time, we will agree with the recommendation.
So, this is your first Tableau chart (Figure 4.4). It looks strange, but we wanted to know who our largest customers were. To do that, we need to sort our chart so that the customers with the largest revenue are at the top.
There are several ways to do that; for now, we will click on the Sort button above the columns/rows area, as shown in Figure 4.5:
Figure 4.5: Clicking on the sort button to organize columns/rows
Our chart looks as shown in Figure 4.6:
It seems that we have a lot of customers with the same level of revenue, so this is probably not the most insightful chart we could create. But with Tableau, we are never more than a few clicks away from finding more information. For example, which industries bring the largest revenue?
To answer that question, we will select the Industry field and drag it on top of the Account Name field in the Rows panel.
We now have a much better-looking chart as shown in Figure 4.7:
After sorting it in descending order as we did before, this is what our chart looks as shown in Figure 4.8:
Figure 4.8: Descending sorted chart.
We now know that Engineering and Apparel are the largest industries by revenues, with Energy being a distant third.