Changing Mark Types (Dots, Lines, Bars, etc.)

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video I want to look at the Marks card.
• 00:06 Specifically I want to show you how to change the marks types.
• 00:09 So let's head over here and create a quick visualization.
• 00:12 Again, grab our breeds over there, and our count.
• 00:16 And we can see we've got a basic bar chart here, and we've looked at this many times.
• 00:21 So these are bars, right?
• 00:23 Maybe you want to change them to something else.
• 00:25 You can do that in the Marks card.
• 00:26 You can see right here in this little drop down, it says Automatic.
• 00:30 And if I click on here, you can see there's a bunch of different things.
• 00:33 We have bars, lines, area charts, squares, circles, shapes, text,
• 00:37 maps, pie charts, Gantt bars, polygons and density.
• 00:41 And so you can play around with these.
• 00:43 Now, not all of these will work with every visualization, as we'll see in a second.
• 00:47 But you'll certainly get a sense of which ones will work better.
• 00:50 So if we go line for instance,
• 00:52 we can change this into a quick little line chart, very cool.
• 00:56 We can come down here and try area chart, and
• 00:59 now it's sort of your standard area chart, that's nice.
• 01:03 Let's see, we can do squares, and now instead of lines or bars,
• 01:08 we just have sort of dots to represent the things.
• 01:11 And you can still hover over these and get the actual data.
• 01:14 So that's a square, we can also do circle, same thing, only it's a little circle.
• 01:19 Let's see, we can try shapes.
• 01:21 And that's just a sort of a circle that's sort of hollow.
• 01:26 And what else we have, we can do text.
• 01:27 It's just going to say ABC, which is kind of weird, not that useful.
• 01:32 We can do a map, we're not going to get anything but a dot for that one.
• 01:36 We can do pie, same thing, slightly bigger dots.
• 01:39 And we could do Gantt bars, which would just little short Gantt bar lines,
• 01:43 kind of weird.
• 01:44 Or we could do a polygon which is kind of odd-looking.
• 01:48 And then finally density, which is sort of, well,
• 01:51 sort of heat mappy looking things.
• 01:53 So like I said, this will work well with some things and not other things.
• 01:58 So for instance, if we come up here, and in fact, let's just start over again,
• 02:02 let me clear this whole thing.
• 02:04 because after you mess with this,
• 02:05 things can get a little wonky if you try to then change it later.
• 02:08 So, again, let's pull over our breed and our dog data.
• 02:13 And let's come up here and, I don't know, let's try the pie chart.
• 02:17 And we can resize this, there we go.
• 02:24 Okay, so it's nice and bigger.
• 02:26 Now if we want to change this, for instance, to bar,
• 02:28 we can change this to one weird looking long bar.
• 02:31 And it's still doing sort of the same thing as the pie chart, right?
• 02:34 It's just in bar form, which may be useful under certain circumstances.
• 02:38 If we try and do a line chart, though, well, that's not useful at all, right?
• 02:43 Same thing with most of the other things.
• 02:45 If we do a square, well, we're kind of basically building a tree map now, right?
• 02:50 So you would be better suited just to click Tree Map in that case, right?
• 02:55 We can try shapes, that's really not all that useful.
• 03:00 Squares we already did, circles.
• 03:04 And this is basically just a packed bubble chart basically, but not as good.
• 03:08 Again, you would just want to use this packed bubble chart from the Show Me menu if
• 03:12 you wanted to do something like that.
• 03:14 Map, not at all useful.
• 03:18 Polygon, Density, really not that useful either.
• 03:23 And you'll notice, if we go back to Automatic,
• 03:26 it's already sort of been confused.
• 03:28 It didn't go back to the pie chart, which is why a lot of times you're
• 03:31 going to have to, if you're messing around with this and you want to go back,
• 03:35 you're just going to have to start over.
• 03:37 Pull our breed and our count, go back to Pie Chart and then we're back to normal.
• 03:43 So, like I said, play around with these, some of these things will work.
• 03:47 We try and do a bar with that, it just is not going to work, right?
• 03:51 Density, not so much.
• 03:53 Some of them are better suited to change the marks, some of them are not.
• 03:57 And you'll get a feel for that as you play with this a little bit.
• 03:59 So that's how you can change your marks, very useful under certain circumstances,
• 04:03 completely useless under other circumstances, but
• 04:06 interesting nonetheless.
• 04:07 So that's all for this video, in the next video, we'll look at changing mark sizes.

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