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Organizing Data In Tableau
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Quick reference
Organizing Data In Tableau
In this lesson, you'll learn how to organize the data in the Tables Side Bar.
When to use
Use this technique when you have too many dimensions or measures to keep track of.
Instructions
Click the caret at the top of the Tables Side Bar, then select "Group By Folder".
Right click on any dimension or measure and select "Folders" and then "Create Folder".
Once the folder has been created, drag and drop and dimensions or measures into it.
Hints & tips
- Click the caret at the top of the Tables Side Bar, then select "Group By Folder".
- Right click on any dimension or measure and select "Folders" and then "Create Folder".
- Drag and Drop items into the folder
- 00:04 In this video,
- 00:05 I want to talk about organizing our data over here on this left hand panel.
- 00:09 So, you see the data is listed here.
- 00:12 We can click on Analytics.
- 00:13 We're not really going to get into that.
- 00:15 But you can see we've got several dimensions and several measures.
- 00:18 Now, like I said earlier, this is a very tame data source.
- 00:21 There's not a lot of columns in our file here, we've got 1, 2,
- 00:25 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 it looks like.
- 00:29 So this is not so important for this dataset.
- 00:32 But there are times when you may have, like I said, dozens or
- 00:35 even hundreds of columns.
- 00:37 And this can become really unruly over here and really hard to navigate with just
- 00:41 rows, and rows, and rows of these things being listed here.
- 00:44 So you may want to sort of group these together into folders to clean
- 00:48 up the space, to make it easier to read, to make it easier to navigate.
- 00:53 So if you have a folder with ten things in it that are all sort of similar,
- 00:58 it's easier to look in that folder than to sort of hunt through dozens of these
- 01:02 listed here and scroll through.
- 01:04 Like I said, we don't have many listed, so it's not a big deal.
- 01:07 But in many cases, you're going to have a lot listed here and
- 01:10 you may be overwhelmed.
- 01:12 And you're going to want to organize these.
- 01:14 So how do we do it?
- 01:15 Well, let's see we've got a couple of these we want to stick into a folder.
- 01:19 If we come over here and click on the little caret, we get this drop down.
- 01:23 And you'll notice it says folders here, but it's grayed out.
- 01:26 So, it has the ability to add folders, but it doesn't seem to want to let us do it.
- 01:32 So how do we get around this.
- 01:33 Well, we can come up here to the very top in this caret right here, and
- 01:37 we can group by, you'll notice it says group by data source table.
- 01:41 That's the default.
- 01:42 We could just change this to group by folder.
- 01:45 Now when we do that, you'll notice up here it says folders.
- 01:48 And now we can click on here and the folders thing is now clickable, right?
- 01:53 So we can click Create Folder.
- 01:55 Let's name this.
- 01:55 And I'm going to call this Colors and Names.
- 02:00 So now we have this folder Colors and Names.
- 02:02 And inside of here we can see our colors dimension.
- 02:05 Now I'm also going to grab our dog name.
- 02:07 And I'm just going to hold my button down and click and drag, and
- 02:11 then just drop it in and we see now dog name is in there.
- 02:14 If we want to bring a measure, so for instance, if we want the dog data also
- 02:19 to be in that folder, we can grab it and bring it up, drop it in.
- 02:23 And you'll notice it's kind of hard to see when it's highlighted but
- 02:27 it continues to have that separation between the blue and the green.
- 02:32 The blue top dimensions and the green bottom measures.
- 02:36 And there's a little bar behind there.
- 02:38 So, very cool and very easy way to sort of categorize your things,
- 02:41 organize your screen a little bit better.
- 02:44 And it's really cool.
- 02:45 Now we can click this to minimize it and now all those things disappear.
- 02:49 They're hidden inside that folder.
- 02:51 Now in the future if we want colors and names,
- 02:53 we just let's go over to the Colors and Names folder, click it, boom.
- 02:56 And then you start dragging stuff around like we always do.
- 03:00 Very, very cool.
- 03:01 So, let me just pull these out.
- 03:04 Just that easy to organize stuff.
- 03:06 And like I said, in our particular dataset, this is not a big deal,
- 03:10 because there's just not a whole lot of columns.
- 03:12 So if we go back to our data source, we can see there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,7.
- 03:17 And not a big deal.
- 03:18 We really don't have to organize these things into folders.
- 03:22 Like I said, if you have dozens of columns, hundreds of columns,
- 03:26 thousands of columns, it's conceivable you could have in any data source.
- 03:30 This is a great way to organize them.
- 03:32 So you just going to want to come through here, make up folders that make sense for
- 03:35 your particular dataset.
- 03:37 And then just start adding things into those folders and
- 03:39 you should be good to go.
- 03:41 Now, I'm going to undo that.
- 03:45 I'm going to pull those back out.
- 03:47 And just like that it's gone away.
- 03:49 What I did was hit Ctrl+Z, Cmd+Z if you're on a Mac, to redo the last few things.
- 03:55 I just kept hitting it until that went away.
- 03:58 Like I said, so we don't really need folders and
- 04:00 we can come back here if we wanted to and switch us back to group by data source.
- 04:04 And now you can see it says tables up there.
- 04:06 Really doesn't matter what it says up there, but that's how you do it.
- 04:10 So in the next video,
- 04:11 we're going to spend a couple of minutes talking about changing names of things.
- 04:14 And that'll be in the next video.
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