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About this lesson
In this lesson, you'll learn how to resize charts and change basic colors for headers and more.
Exercise files
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Quick reference
Resizing Charts and Changing Colors and Headers
In this lesson, you'll learn how to resize charts and change basic colors for headers and more.
When to use
Use these techniques whenever you need to resize a chart or change a color.
Instructions
To resize a chart, hover your mouse around the edges of the chart until you see the cursor to double arrows. Hold down the mouse button and drag the chart to whatever size you like.
To change the color of a header, click the caret near the header itself, and choose "Edit Title". Make whatever changes you like, click "apply" and then click "ok".
Hints & tips
- Resizing charts is as easy as drag and drop.
- To change the color or font of a header, click the header caret and select "Edit Title"
- 00:04 Okay, in this video we're going to look at changing chart sizes and header colors,
- 00:08 and things like that.
- 00:09 So, all right, we've got a couple of charts here.
- 00:11 And I'm going to come over here, and
- 00:13 I'm just going to change this to a pie chart just to make this really dramatic,
- 00:16 because the pie chart by default for some reason is really small.
- 00:19 And you can notice, we can't really tell anything,
- 00:22 you can see there's a legend over here.
- 00:24 There's usually a legend on this side for most things, check that out.
- 00:28 But I mentioned earlier we can resize these,
- 00:31 by just sort of very slowly dragging your mouse to the edge here.
- 00:34 And you can see when I do it changes the cursor to this resize thing,
- 00:39 it's kind of tricky to get it just right.
- 00:42 You have to sort of sometimes play with it.
- 00:45 And then you just hold your mouse button, click and
- 00:48 then drag to whatever size you want.
- 00:50 Now, that resized it that way, we still have to resize it up and down, or
- 00:53 else this really doesn't change.
- 00:55 So the same thing we just kind of move our mouse around down here until it changes
- 00:59 the cursor.
- 01:00 Click and drag and now we can make this bigger.
- 01:03 And boom, that's much better.
- 01:05 So in the next video, I'll show you how to add labels and things to charts, for
- 01:08 instance, the pie chart.
- 01:10 because right now all we can tell is just by sort of hovering over it,
- 01:13 which is not that useful.
- 01:15 But now I want to talk about the header here.
- 01:16 So, this says Dog Breeds and that's actually the name of our worksheet.
- 01:21 So if we come down here and rename this, and we could say,
- 01:25 The Dog Breeds, boom, you can see up here it changes to The Dog Breeds.
- 01:30 I'm going to come down here and change that back again.
- 01:34 But it doesn't have to be sort of locked to whatever you called your worksheet,
- 01:39 we can change this.
- 01:40 So, we come over here and you can see there's a caret.
- 01:43 Most things with Tableau you've probably noticed so far that if we kind of hover
- 01:47 over it, a caret menu pops up, we can click on, and here we can see Edit Title.
- 01:51 And you can see by default it's just adding the sheet name,
- 01:54 which is Dog Breeds, but we can change this to whatever we want.
- 01:58 So maybe we want to change this to Dog Breed Pie Chart.
- 02:02 And when we click Apply, boom, it changes to Dog Breed Pie Chart.
- 02:07 And we can also change the color here.
- 02:09 So we need to click and drag to sort of highlight all of this stuff.
- 02:13 Or you can hit Ctrl A on your keyboard, the control button and
- 02:16 the A button at the same time.
- 02:17 If you're on a Mac, I think it's command and A at the same time.
- 02:20 Or you could just hold your button down, click and drag, and
- 02:23 then come over here to the little colored thing, and just pick any color you want.
- 02:27 So if we want blue, now it's blue, I can click Apply, sort of changes.
- 02:31 Same thing, I can highlight this and change it to bold.
- 02:35 See boom, now it changes to bold.
- 02:37 We can also change the font size, so 72, really big, maybe that's a little too big.
- 02:44 So, dial it back down to 24, that looks pretty good.
- 02:48 You can also italicize this or underline it.
- 02:52 I think that's going a little too far.
- 02:54 We don't want to be crazy.
- 02:55 I'll take that off.
- 02:57 You can also insert several different things over here.
- 03:00 The workbook name, for instance, sheet name, the date update time.
- 03:05 See it does it automatically, if you apply that.
- 03:08 There you go, it's kind of interesting.
- 03:12 Change that back.
- 03:13 And that's really all there is to it.
- 03:14 So really easy to change the header, the size, the font, the color.
- 03:19 We can see this is Tableau Light, the font,
- 03:21 we could change this to anything we want, there's wide Latin.
- 03:25 And again, you need to highlight the whole thing, click on Wide Latin again, Apply.
- 03:30 So that's not very professional.
- 03:33 We'll go ahead and change that back.
- 03:36 Boom, there we go.
- 03:37 I also mentioned we just pick the colors that are listed.
- 03:39 You can click here to get a color wheel,
- 03:41 changes to absolutely any color that you want.
- 03:44 Or you can come down here and type in an HTML hex color code if you know those.
- 03:48 Or you can change the hue saturation value the red, green, or
- 03:51 blue RGB value right there.
- 03:53 So you have complete control over this, however you want this to look,
- 03:56 whatever colors you want to use you can, and it's very cool.
- 03:58 So, cancel out of there and cancel out of there.
- 04:01 And that's all there is to it.
- 04:02 So, that's how to change the size of a chart.
- 04:06 Now one thing I will mention, if we change this back to a bar chart, and
- 04:10 then change it back again to a pie chart, all that formatting is gone.
- 04:13 So just keep that in mind.
- 04:14 And that's not just for a pie chart.
- 04:16 If we come over here, we can sort of hover at the edge of this one, and
- 04:20 there's our little cursor change.
- 04:22 I can drag this back over and change the size of that.
- 04:25 I could do the same thing right here, right?
- 04:28 So you have really a lot of control over all of these different charts.
- 04:32 Just go ahead and change that back.
- 04:34 And if you're not familiar, I'm hitting the Ctrl and
- 04:37 the Z button, to undo changes.
- 04:40 That's just a standard, it's not a Tableau thing, that's universal on Windows,
- 04:44 Ctrl Z is undo.
- 04:45 So, that's how I'm doing that, and pretty cool.
- 04:48 So that's how to resize your charts and play around with the colors and
- 04:51 the fonts of your headers.
- 04:52 In the next video, we'll look at adding labels to our charts.
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