Line charts in Tableau | Tableau Charts

0:00Hey, it's Tim here. Today we're going to

0:01show you how to build a line chart in just

0:03under two

0:04minutes. We're using the same life

0:06expectancy data I used for the histogram

0:08video, and this time

0:09around we're going to just look at the

0:10simple way to create a line chart. For this

0:12one I'm going to

0:13drag the year value, notice that it's green

0:14, we'll come back to that a little later, we

0:16'll put it on

0:17columns, and then we're just going to drag

0:18any of these other measures and put it on

0:20rows, and you'll

0:21see Tableau draws a line chart. It's that

0:23simple, but so many people fight with this

0:25chart type

0:26because they don't understand the

0:28difference between blue and green fields in

0:30Tableau,

0:31essentially discrete and continuous fields.

0:33You see at the moment the year field is

0:35green,

0:35but if I remove that field and then I go

0:38here to the year value and I make it

0:40discrete,

0:40you see it turns blue, and now when I drag

0:42it onto columns, Tableau draws a bar chart.

0:46And this is

0:46fundamental because if you allow Tableau to

0:48decide what chart types it's going to build

0:50for you,

0:51it will always make this distinction

0:53because it perceives discrete data as best

0:55displayed using

0:56a bar chart. How do you override that? Well

0:59here in the marks pane you can see you

1:01actually have

1:01an automatic setting. This is where Tableau

1:04is deriving its sort of automated chart

1:06selection

1:06for you. If you go ahead and manually

1:08select line, the line chart comes back, but

1:11it looks a bit

1:11different because at the bottom instead of

1:13having an axis you have the individual

1:15discrete years.

1:17If I then go back, go ahead, make this

1:20continuous again, clear the sheet by

1:22clicking this button at

1:22the top and draw that again with columns at

1:25the top and let's this time take adult

1:27mortality,

1:27you'll see at the bottom we get a range. So

1:30that is a line chart and hopefully I've

1:33also cleared up

1:34the biggest confusion around why Tableau

1:35behaves the way it does when you're trying

1:37to build a line

1:38chart inside a Tableau. If you want to add

1:40a little bit of flair you can always add

1:42context

1:43to this as well. For example if I take the

1:45countries I can put it on color and you can

1:47see

1:48this gets super noisy. So how can you make

1:50one country stand out compared to the

1:52others? Well

1:54here's a little trick you could do. You can

1:56go ahead and create something called a set.

1:58Let's

1:58go ahead and go here, select set. When we

2:00do that we can essentially pick out one

2:03country and select

2:04okay and then when we do that that country

2:06set is essentially remembered that one

2:08value. So if we

2:08want to look at Afghanistan versus all the

2:10other countries instead of country what we

2:12can do is we

2:13can go ahead and put country on color and

2:15this is a bit of an unfair comparison

2:17because if you notice

2:19Tableau is aggregating the adult mortality

2:20values. What we actually want to do is look

2:22at the average.

2:23So let's go ahead select average and now

2:26you can see that in blue we've got

2:28Afghanistan and all the

2:29other countries in gray but it's

2:31calculating the average for those countries

2:34. In 2002 there must

2:36have been an anomaly where there was no

2:38data collected but as you can see both

2:40charts are

2:40trending downwards but Afghanistan has a

2:42much higher adult mortality rate compared

2:45to all the

2:45other countries in the world. That's my

2:47time up hopefully you found this video

2:48valuable and I'll

2:49catch you in the next video. If you're not

2:51subscribed yet please subscribe it really

2:52helps the channel and I'll catch you soon.

2:54you

2:54you

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