Organizing Data In Tableau

Quick reference

• 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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