Creating Custom Measures

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, in this video I want to show you how to create custom measures using
• 00:07 calculations.
• 00:08 Now this is a pretty broad topic, and
• 00:10 honestly I could spend probably the better part of an entire course just on this.
• 00:14 So we're not going to get into this in very great detail.
• 00:17 I'm just going to sort of whet your appetite and
• 00:18 show you a little bit what you can do to create a custom measure.
• 00:21 So we've really only got a couple of measures down here.
• 00:24 There is really only one that we've been using, this count, and
• 00:27 it's the entire count.
• 00:28 We can create a custom one and really sort of define exactly what we show.
• 00:32 So I'm going to click on the little caret here, and
• 00:34 let's go create a calculated field.
• 00:37 Now we can name this anything we want.
• 00:39 Let's call this a 1,000 breakdown.
• 00:44 So let's say we want to break these into chunks of 1,000.
• 00:48 We've been doing a lot of filters of dog count with 2,000 and above
• 00:51 because that really gives us more useful data that's visually pleasing to look at.
• 00:56 There's only a few dogs that have a count over 2,000 that makes the charter graph
• 00:59 looks nicer.
• 01:00 So we've been creating that filter over and over.
• 01:03 Well, we could just break that down in this custom measure.
• 01:06 So we've got this count.
• 01:08 This is the calculation that is creating this current count, right?
• 01:12 So what we could do is go let's create some logic.
• 01:15 So we could go if the custom count is, let's say, greater than 2,000.
• 01:20 That's what we've been doing up until now.
• 01:22 Well, what do we want to do?
• 01:23 Well, then let's create a label called 2,000+.
• 01:28 Now that will just create a label with only 2, 000 and
• 01:32 everything else will be listed as a null value.
• 01:36 So we could do that.
• 01:38 Now we need an end statement because an if statement always has an end statement.
• 01:42 So and we could see our calculation is valid.
• 01:45 Before we had that on there it was giving us an error.
• 01:48 Now we have our end statement so it's valid.
• 01:50 So we could do this.
• 01:50 We could just click this and boom, now its 1,000 breakdown has been added.
• 01:55 So if really quickly we want to add our breeds and
• 01:58 we want to add our 1,000 breakdown, you can see we have 2000+ as a column now.
• 02:05 And there's only a few dogs listed because,
• 02:07 as we've seen in the past, when we filter by 2,000 you only get a few dogs.
• 02:12 In fact, we could see that if we pull over our data our count as well.
• 02:18 And then if we wanted to filter this we could filter by 2,000 and
• 02:23 you can see 2000+ is the only thing listed.
• 02:26 I don't really want to do that so I'll pull this out of here.
• 02:30 So you'll see right here is 2000+,right?
• 02:34 That those few dogs, and everything else is null.
• 02:37 If we want to get rid of null we can always filter this.
• 02:39 So we can grab this and bring it over and just get rid of the null values.
• 02:43 And then, boom, we're just going to get that same group of 2,000 that we have
• 02:48 been filtering for earlier.
• 02:50 But now we've got a custom measure for it.
• 02:51 So kind of interesting.
• 02:53 We could break this down even further.
• 02:54 So let's clear this and let's modify this 1,000 breakdown.
• 02:58 So let's come over here and edit it.
• 02:59 So we've got a basic if statement.
• 03:01 We can keep going.
• 03:02 We can go else if.
• 03:06 And let me copy this little thing again and let's do another thing.
• 03:10 So we could go if that count is, let's say,
• 03:15 greater than 1,000 and
• 03:18 if the count is less than 2,000, right?
• 03:23 Then we want to say 1,000 to 2,000.
• 03:31 And then we can do a final else.
• 03:34 And we say everything else, then let's just go 0 to 1,000.
• 03:40 So we've created three things here, greater than 2,000,
• 03:43 from 1,000 to 2,000, and then from 0 to 1,000.
• 03:47 So if we say okay for this, and now we recreate this guy one more time,
• 03:51 pull this over, we can see we've got three buckets here, 0 to 1,000.
• 03:56 1,000 to 2,000 is kind of small, we might want to make this bigger.
• 04:01 1,000 to 2,000 and then 2,000+.
• 04:05 And if we actually pull in our data to see those results we could see,
• 04:11 That broken down.
• 04:12 Now we've got three side by side columns like this.
• 04:15 What we could do is just make one graph and make this measure a color thing.
• 04:23 So I'm not holding down the control button.
• 04:24 I'm just dragging this completely over here.
• 04:26 Boom, now we get a chart.
• 04:28 And we can see there's a little legend over here from 0 to 1,000,
• 04:31 from 1,000 to 2,000, and 2,000+.
• 04:34 And that is just those things we said right here in the quotation marks.
• 04:39 So 2,000+, see, 2,000+.
• 04:42 Here is 1,000 to 2,000.
• 04:43 There's 1,000 to 2,000, 0 to 1,000, 0 to 1,000.
• 04:48 So very cool, very easy way to make custom measures.
• 04:51 Now like I said, there's lots of different ways you can do this.
• 04:54 This is a huge topic this logic that we did in here, right?
• 04:59 I really kind of blew through this very quickly so
• 05:01 we could spend a lot more time talking about it.
• 05:03 And we're not because this is a very introductory course.
• 05:05 But if you wanted to learn more about these things you could sort of look this
• 05:08 up in the future.
• 05:09 It's probably a good thing to learn going forward after this course.
• 05:12 Getting into these calculations and the different code that you can write in here.
• 05:15 The great thing about Tableau is that you don't have to write code.
• 05:18 So a lot of people don't like to do things like this where this is really kind of
• 05:21 like code that we're writing, right?
• 05:23 But it's not that hard.
• 05:24 It's pretty simple structure, if, else, else, if, then.
• 05:28 And so it's really not that bad and it gives you a good
• 05:31 measure of control over exactly what is shown in your visualization.
• 05:36 So that's pretty cool.
• 05:37 So that's all for this video.
• 05:38 In the next video we're going to start to look at zip codes.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.