0:00It's time we took Sigma for a spin.
0:02Now this is a funny video because
0:04I
0:04got into, let's say, some complications.
0:08Uh
0:08when I mentioned Sigma
0:10in my last newsletter, yes, I've not written the newsletter since that newsletter
0:14because
0:15my god did it trigger some change here on this channel.
0:18But
0:19for the last
0:20I think uh
0:21year and a half I've been using Sigma
0:23um as part of my work, aimpointdigital.
0:25com.
0:25Go check it out.
0:27And I've actually enjoyed using it.
0:29I've enjoyed using it a lot.
0:30But
0:30but I'll I'll also be a little bit honest.
0:32There are some parts of it
0:34that really frustrate me.
0:36But
0:37nonetheless, um
0:38Sigma is a very different type of experience to Tableau.
0:41And what I wanted to do is really
0:44open the account on Sigma
0:45on this channel
0:46Now, actually, this whole week
0:48I'm opening the account on multiple platforms.
0:51So
0:51today it's Sigma.
0:52Tomorrow it will be Thought Spot.
0:54On Wednesday it will be Hex
0:56and on Thursday it will be Omni and on Friday I don't know what we'll do.
1:00We'll talk about the experience of using all of these in a very, very short amount of time.
1:04Now the reality is I've actually experienced all of those platforms in different ways over the last six months.
1:10So you can go ahead and see that in
1:12the various videos I've got on this channel.
1:14If you head to my website, actually, this is the best place to see
1:16my experience on each platform
1:18um
1:19but today we're going to start with sigma now
1:21sigma is very different to tableau the experience is very different so i was trying to think of like
1:26What are the ways that I can make this more familiar to Tableau users?
1:30But also if you're here and you've never used Tableau, you maybe you're a Power
1:33BI user, maybe you're
1:34a user from another platform evaluating sigma.
1:37I also want to make this accessible to you.
1:39So what I will do is I will explain philosophically how Sigma
1:42is different.
1:43to the BI tools that I'm used to.
1:45But it's really up to you to sort of draw the comparisons and judgments about whether it works for you or not.
1:50Another thing is that these platforms change very often.
1:52So today you're watching this video, this is how Sigma
1:55looks
1:55In the future, these analogies or uh comparisons I'm making might be different.
2:00The final thing is that Sigma
2:01have given me access to this environment.
2:03This is something that I've got through their influencer program.
2:06So whilst this video is not sponsored
2:08It is also not as easy to get access to a Sigma environment just for kicks.
2:12And as part of my last newsletter, I talked a little bit about transparency.
2:17And so I want to keep that straight here as well.
2:19Okay, that's all the preamble um forward-looking statements as Salesforce
2:24like to call them
2:25out of the way.
2:26Let's talk about
2:27Sigma.
2:28So
2:28Sigma is a very interesting tool.
2:30This is Sigma here.
2:31I've just landed on this uh platform page.
2:33This is my playground.
2:34It's exclusive to me and it's been set up.
2:37And it's
2:37it's so vanilla, in fact.
2:39I've I've actually
2:39genuinely I'm sorry Katrina, I've abused this uh
2:43privilege.
2:43I've not used it as much as I should have done.
2:46And um yeah, I have a vanilla experience.
2:49All I have done is set up um a snowflake data source.
2:52I actually have my own snowflake uh setup um that I use for
2:56tutorials and I use it for demos and also the LinkedIn courses that I've made.
2:59So a Snowflake TNMD
3:01data demo is my own uh space
3:04but
3:04This is the Sigma sample
3:06database that comes with this environment.
3:07Another thing you'll see is that I have got some basic things in here.
3:10Um I set some things up yesterday.
3:12I sort of did a quick spin.
3:14um of some various things but this is essentially the general experience.
3:17I've not customized it.
3:18This is not an enterprise example.
3:20Part of this whole environment is we're going to do some of that throughout the course of covering Sigma
3:25this year.
3:26Another thing is
3:27I am not a Sigma Jedi.
3:28I'm not yet a Sigma Jedi.
3:30I have many, many colleagues and friends who do stuff on Workout Wednesday
3:34that I make videos with over at Endpoint.
3:36So go ahead and check them out
3:37Some of them are also well recognized in the Sigma community.
3:40But needless to say, if you just fight for a relaxed way of discovering Sigma, we're going to do it through this video.
3:47Right.
3:48So
3:48the first thing I'm going to do is just generally create a new workbook.
3:52This is uh known as a document in Sigma, but it's just another type of asset.
3:55If you've used Tableau, this is a Power BI workbook.
3:58If you've used Tableau, it's a Tableau workbook.
4:00If you use Power BI, it's a Power BI workbook.
4:02It's exactly the same thing.
4:03But you do have these different
4:04types of assets you can create.
4:06Strictly speaking, given the way that I've been preaching analytics
4:10over the last few years and a half, I would always start with a data model, but this is not that video.
4:15Um
4:15I actually think it's criminal to open up a Sigma asset without first
4:20uh
4:20really focusing on the data model.
4:22To me, that
4:23like
4:24the kind of power that Sigma has behind the scenes, I just think it's criminal to be building assets without first
4:31grounding them in the data model and really investing time into them.
4:35The first uh client experience I had of Sigma, I actually spent eighty myself eighty percent of the time in the data model.
4:41And once I got everything working in the data model, it literally took no time to get it working
4:46inside of the workbook.
4:47So this is not the sort of best example, but here
4:50you go.
4:51We've opened up a workbook.
4:52It's uh it's a very plain workbook now
4:54You've got some templates you can start with.
4:56We're gonna
4:57broadly ignore these and we're just gonna um
4:59kind of get straight into the interface.
5:01So here at the bottom you've got data, input, charts, controls, UI, and layout.
5:05So
5:05these are the different uh capabilities that are available to you.
5:08What I'm gonna do is click on data and I'm just gonna select table
5:13So one of the things that Sigma does is it doesn't have a data connection window at this point because the data connections are centralized and the idea is you set them up in one place, the admin is
5:22admins, curators, data engineer.
5:25set them up, curate them up for you, and then you just simply come and use what you have access to.
5:29Another reason why that's good is because some of the configuration required to make these databases work really, really well
5:35requires a little bit of experience with the warehouse as well.
5:38So I actually think this is a good
5:39decision it stops the sprawl of data connections that can happen in so many other platforms and it just makes it easy.
5:45That said
5:46you have to be paying attention to this
5:48select source interface
5:50because
5:50It can change up on you for lots of good reasons, but also for sometimes bad reasons, it will change the order of what's going on here.
5:56So the best way I always like to
5:58explain this is
5:59The suggested list is just essentially what Sigma thinks is going to be relevant to you.
6:02This is literally based on what you've been doing.
6:04So every single user will have a different experience of this.
6:07But
6:08here for me what it's doing is it's showing the data sources
6:10I surprise surprise used yesterday when I was thinking about doing this
6:14demo.
6:14The next one is
6:15elements
6:16now I've got nothing in this workbook so you don't see anything here we will come back to this later on I've got no elements whatsoever this is page one so this is our starting workbook so there's nothing in this page
6:25that I can connect and
6:26you might think, why would I connect to an existing element?
6:29Well one of the ideas is that Sigma lets you connect um
6:33directly to an element
6:34on your workbook.
6:36So you can connect uh to the data that comes from a specific chart if you want to do something to it.
6:40So that's quite a novel idea and you can use that to do some really complex uh tricks without having to do weird things like LODs
6:47that you would do maybe inside of Tableau
6:49or Power BI or DAX
6:50or something like that.
6:50like that.
6:51Then you've got data sources.
6:52So these are the things that you can connect to and are set up for you.
6:56And they're sort of organized
6:57into these logical places.
6:58So if I go to connections, you can see those are the two databases I talked about before.
7:02Um I'll go ahead and select Snowflake TNMD data demo and then you'll see what's in my demo experience now.
7:09Kirk and I have have done a bit of work in our
7:11Snowflake.
7:12Actually, I'm I'm I'm such a good friend to Kirk.
7:14I give him access to my Snowflake instance
7:16uh
7:16and uh thankfully he's not burnt my credits, but Kirk, if you're watching
7:20Um yeah, don't burn my credits.
7:22But
7:23because I give uh Kirk access to my um uh environment, I have some of his lovely data modeling data sources.
7:29available in here.
7:30I'm actually going to use Superstore Flat, which um I think I set up with him to do the data um modeling uh capabilities.
7:37So let's go ahead and select orders and you
7:39see as soon as we select that we get that table in.
7:42So
7:43As a starter, we've connected to a data source.
7:45That data source has created this table.
7:47So there's actually two things in this
7:50workbook so far, that data source and this table.
7:54Now you might wonder, well, how do I see that
7:56Sigma
7:57has this lovely uh
7:58lineage view.
7:59I actually love this.
8:00I just really wish Tableau
8:02had this.
8:03It's like one of the best things in Sigma.
8:05And here you see that lineage.
8:06And so I mentioned there were two things.
8:08You have orders and then you have the orders table.
8:10So
8:11although we see one thing, it's actually originating two things.
8:14And this is super super important, especially once you start to get into the way that Sigma works.
8:19So we'll go ahead and close out of this and we'll go back to our table.
8:22So we've got our orders table.
8:23You can optionally go and add other things.
8:25So let's go ahead and add um the other elements.
8:28So let's go back to our flat, let's add people.
8:30This is superstore, but just inside of Snowflake.
8:33So let's go ahead and
8:34Put returns.
8:35Now if you were doing this and you wanted to say hey
8:37add like a another another um
8:40data set that's maybe not in here
8:41Um you have a couple of options.
8:43You can of course
8:44go back, choose something from the connector.
8:45You can add a connection here as well, that's allowed.
8:48And you can also go here and select CSV SQL and do any sort of uh data prep you might need to in order to connect to something.
8:54So those are not invisible to you, they are available here, but you just have to be
8:59mindful that the philosophy is somewhat different here in Sigma.
9:02So anyway, we've got the three tables that we want.
9:04Again, if I go back to my lineage view here on the bottom right, you'll see that that's already available.
9:08So three things
9:09all on page one, they're all tables on page one.
9:12And so this comes to the first sort of um philosophical difference.
9:17Um
9:17everything in Sigma is sort of part of the experience.
9:20So I'm going to rename this and call it my data
9:22tab.
9:23So that is a page.
9:24This is going to be a view that will never be visible to users.
9:27And you can see here you can hide the page, but there's no ability to do that because we haven't added a second page.
9:32So let's go ahead and add a second page.
9:34And now
9:35when we go back, you can
9:36can see you can hide the page more easily and so this is a page that no user will ever see that's where I'm always going to put my data
9:42I actually tend to move all my controls to that page as well.
9:46And I also call this the uh data tab
9:48for a simple reason that all my other data sources are based off it.
9:52So
9:52I also do something very, very weird.
9:54Uh maybe other Sigma users do this.
9:56I then create a data page for each page and you might wonder why on earth
10:00do this.
10:01Well, this is because of the way that the lineage works in Sigma.
10:05By doing this, we can apply changes centrally to the main data source.
10:08and then differently to each page to do uh some sort of different behavior.
10:13And again, I learned this the hardware working for a client.
10:15I wanted to do something pretty large scale.
10:17And because I hadn't thought this through
10:19I literally ended up spending half a day getting all my Sigma tables back into the right setup.
10:24So now I just do this out of habit, even if I don't need to do that.
10:27So yes, this is taking a bit of time, but
10:29I'm gonna go ahead and say
10:30one here.
10:31Okay, so we've set up data page one.
10:32We're gonna go ahead and actually create the uh page itself that we're gonna use.
10:36So we'll call this uh
10:38uh
10:38Okay now that I've done that
10:40um
10:40in data page one
10:41I would very much like to add the data that I'm going to use.
10:44I'm going to use the raw data for my uh data table.
10:47So I'll go in here and I'll select data again and you're probably wondering wait Tim you've already got it over in the data tab
10:53And that's correct, but now we can do something we haven't done yet.
10:56If you go to elements, you can see that all the tabs I've been creating are actually available here
11:00So when I mentioned that you could create uh uh an asset from another asset, this is essentially what we're doing here.
11:06So we're gonna go to the data tab.
11:08I'm gonna select my orders table.
11:09And now I've created the uh
11:11orders table here on my data page for page one.
11:15And so you're thinking, like
11:16Tim, that you're just talking in circles.
11:18This is absolute
11:19Like what are you doing?
11:20Why would you do it this way?
11:21Honestly, trust me, it makes a lot of sense.
11:23You see, I have my orders table.
11:26I've created it in the data tab.
11:28And now
11:28in data page one, I have my orders table here.
11:31And the reason I'll do this is if I wanted to create something specific to this tab.
11:36Well
11:36I can just go ahead and manipulate this specific table.
11:39I can create a calculation at this level
11:41and it won't actually go upstream to this uh table here.
11:44I could create like an aggregation at this level and again it won't go up.
11:47Things don't go backwards, they only sort of work downstream.
11:50However, if I wanted to create something available in all tabs, then I can actually go to my orders table here and create this.
11:57So I'm a real lineage
11:59evangelist here.
12:01You have to use these.
12:02And it makes your life so much easier and it makes it easier to follow as well.
12:06Yes, you can get yourself in a twist, but nonetheless, um, that's sort of what we need to do.
12:10Okay.
12:10So
12:11now I'm in my superstore tab, but we can actually go ahead and build our first chart.
12:14So what I'm going to do is select chart, I'm going to select bar, and it's going to
12:19ask, okay, what element would you like to connect to?
12:21So
12:22everything uses this interface.
12:23It's like a pattern that you can get familiar with.
12:26I go to my elements.
12:27Now I'm using data page one
12:28as my starting point.
12:29There's the orders table.
12:31And now I have the uh white space for my bar chart.
12:34So
12:34my bar chart is going to be pretty simple.
12:36I'm going to drag category.
12:38Actually, I'm going to drag subcategory.
12:40Leave category where it was, subcategory onto the
12:42X-axis and I'm going to drag a sales onto the y-axis and it won't do anything until you've got those two.
12:49There we go, there's our bar chart
12:50And one of the lovely things about
12:52Sigma is you can change the way the spacing works.
12:55You can kind of move things around.
12:56You've got this sort of grid that you can see here
12:58So you can move things around.
13:00You can even do things like you can use this line here on the left to move all the assets beneath it up and down.
13:06Like this is honestly one of the best experiences for layout.
13:09I really, really enjoy it
13:10And the formatting is also very easy.
13:12I won't focus on that in this video.
13:13We'll do a separate video, but it's just really pleasant to use.
13:16So there's our first chart.
13:18There's no much
13:19sort of
13:20fanfare here.
13:21We'll come back to the formatting in a little bit.
13:22Let's go ahead and get more charts onto the canvas.
13:25So the next one we'll do is a donut chart.
13:27Let's go ahead
13:27choose my element again, select orders, and we'll go ahead and put
13:32this here and I'm not doing anything fancy
13:34I'm just creating sort of basic charts and sometimes I actually get the spacing
13:38correct and then I come back and I
13:40I get everything else done.
13:41So I'll give the bar
13:42chart a bit more space.
13:43And then for the
13:44donut chart, what we want to do is get sales again.
13:47I'll put it on value
13:48and the color I'll put category.
13:50So we have the parent category
13:52um running so you'll see that it's already got the
13:55the numbers going on this you didn't have to sort of in tableau
13:57drag the measure or whatever it's just it just worked
14:00all right
14:00so
14:01What next?
14:02Well this is not showing labels, it's not showing percentage.
14:05We do want to sort of bring some of that in.
14:07So
14:07how do we go about doing that?
14:08Well um this is where the formatting option comes in.
14:11If you go up here to the top right hand side, you see this panel is is actually doing quite a lot of work.
14:16Select format you'll see you get data labels
14:17and you can show the data labels and there are a number.
14:20And then the value, you can see here, it's actually already got this option here is a value.
14:24We can go ahead and select percent and it automatically does that for you.
14:28And you can just go down to zero decimal
14:30plus.
14:30places
14:30and that is it.
14:31It's one of the simplest things to do in Sigma.
14:34So that's a very simple thing to do there.
14:36Okay.
14:36Now the next one is um
14:38maybe you just want to bring a
14:39like a
14:40a boring table.
14:41Let's just go ahead and do that.
14:43So surprise, surprise, we've been doing this this whole course or the whole video.
14:46Just go ahead and bring in your table.
14:49With these tables, what you can do is when you click on them and you go back to properties, you can essentially choose
14:54what
14:54you hide and show.
14:56You don't have to show everything.
14:57You can also go to available columns, deselect everything and just bring in the rows that you want.
15:02Remember that this is only applying on this tab on this page.
15:06So
15:06if I go back to my lineage view, you can see that this is starting to make a lot more sense.
15:10And you can maybe see why I've been insisting on doing things
15:13this specifically.
15:14We have the orders table here now
15:16three times, but at each level I can do different things.
15:20So when I'm hiding the columns here, it's not having an effect there.
15:23And if I wanted to make a change to this whole entire
15:25page, I could go and change it here and it would work there.
15:28And if I wanted to make a change across the whole entire data set, I could go there.
15:32And if the data engineer had different ideas, they could do that there.
15:36It's sort of like the idea of separations of concerns, but it's really just, it just makes your life easier in a Sigma.
15:41Just trust me on this one.
15:42Alright, so let's go back out of this
15:44and let's uh um sort of uh add
15:47let's add a map
15:47Now there's three different types of maps.
15:49There's a region map, point map, and geography.
15:52They all need different things, but as you would expect, a region map actually needs uh latitude and longitude.
15:57Geography needs a different kind of spatial uh
15:59bit of information.
16:01The one we want that works nicely out of the box is actually going to be the region map.
16:05So we'll go ahead and select elements, we'll go back to data page one, select orders, and the map is now on the page, and you're probably wondering, okay, what comes next?
16:13So the thing we need to do is essentially give it the geographical field.
16:17In this specific case, it's going to be the country region, I believe.
16:20So let's go ahead and put that on there.
16:22And yep, you can see that it
16:24draws the colours instantly
16:25and it's pretty much ready to go.
16:27Now the colours are not correctly configured, so let's go ahead and bring cells, put that on color, and you'll see that it just says a single color.
16:34But what we actually want to do is not do it by category, we want to do it by scale.
16:38Yeah, we've got to do it by scale, and then we can select the column.
16:41Select sales
16:42and now it's colored by scale.
16:44So something weird happened.
16:45I think the the option just glitched out.
16:47So now we've got that sort of scaled appropriately
16:49Alright, so there's our dashboard.
16:51Um
16:51it's pretty good now.
16:52There's a couple of general um dashboarding formatting things.
16:56So if you go over here to the right hand side and you just select and
16:59the canvas you can do things like trim the space at the top and it will just kill the space at the top.
17:03You can also do formatting you can say is it a full
17:05width thing
17:06you want to do large you want to do medium.
17:08I actually out of habit don't do full width dashboards.
17:11I think they're a very bad idea.
17:13When you go to a web page, typically the content sits in the middle, it doesn't really go off the side, but nonetheless,
17:18yeah, you can kind of
17:20get the idea.
17:21So
17:21One of the things I'm gonna do is
17:24that didn't work how I actually expected it to.
17:26I should have just selected these two like this.
17:28If I hold shift and select both of these, you can size both uh assets at the same time.
17:32same time.
17:32So I'll kind of do something like that and uh leave it like that.
17:35By the way, the the the the columns in the table are not sort of ideal.
17:39I've not even thought about
17:40this I'm just showing you how this all works
17:42now if I go back to the format section uh
17:44look at this you can see there's a couple of other things we can do with the background we can for example change it whether it's light or dark
17:50can change some of the base colors.
17:52Another thing you can do when you select one of these is you can format it and the formatting is kind of
17:57I I really like the way the element styling works.
17:59So for example if I wanted
18:00to uh have padding on the chart you can see that it's inside
18:04padding uh typically applies to the inside of an
18:06uh item
18:07margin typically applies on the outside of an item
18:10And you can change how rounded the corners are, you can give it like a border.
18:13And
18:13something I I've got in the habit of doing in pretty much all my Sigma dashboards is always giving it a bit of a contrast border, and sometimes a little bit more contrast than you'd expect.
18:22So it just
18:23just makes the chart pop out a little bit um and then you can be really sort of uh panicety
18:28with everything now if you right click on this
18:30one of the really cool things is you can choose to copy
18:33uh the
18:34copy the uh element
18:35uh or copy the formatting or paste uh an element below it so i'm gonna copy the format and then i'm gonna right click and i can go back and paste the formatting
18:44So I format once and it is dead easy to apply that specific
18:49format to these things.
18:50So now they've all got that very subtle formatting
18:53already applied.
18:55So
18:55that's uh sort of the first thing.
18:57We've built a few charts, we've built a few things.
18:59Now there's so much more available
19:01just before we get into the rest of uh what's available.
19:04If you go to the bottom, obviously we've got the data tab
19:06You've also got the input tab that allows you to do um
19:09add things like um
19:11CSVs, you can uh add lookups as well.
19:15It's kind of complicated for this video.
19:17I won't I won't try and explain it now.
19:19Different chart types, that's pretty off
19:20obvious.
19:21There's some nice things here like the KPI card.
19:24We kind of build these in Tableau, although again if you're building these in Tableau, I really recommend you don't.
19:28You use something like metrics or Tableau
19:31Pulse where possible.
19:32But
19:32just as an example, if I go in here and I select this.
19:35Um, you can go ahead and give it a value.
19:38Let's go ahead and put uh
19:40sale and then we can go and put order date.
19:42Where is order date?
19:43Now
19:43order day is uh weirdly not yet a date.
19:46So let's go ahead and
19:48convert to date.
19:49There we go.
19:49So now this is a date.
19:50When we drag this onto timeline, you get a nice little uh timeline here.
19:55And the nice thing about these is when you go to formatting.
19:58Again, you've got really sort of high-level control
20:00as to how you want them to look, how the value should sit,
20:04the colour,
20:05even the comparison.
20:07So for example, you can change the comparison,
20:09how far back it goes, how forward it goes.
20:12And this is all controllable through the way it works and the way you set it all up.
20:16So I I really like the way that
20:18Sigma kind of tries to give you all of this.
20:21And it it's really, it's really quite easy.
20:23I I think it's quite easy.
20:25um and you can kind of play around with it.
20:27But anyway, um
20:28all of these controls are really really thorough and detailed.
20:32There is one area that I have not touched on which is actions.
20:35I'll come to that in a in a brief second.
20:37But needless to say, yeah, this is
20:39This is
20:40this is really sort of thoroughly uh sort of thought out.
20:42Here's a couple of the others that I have not um added.
20:45So you can add all of this formatting and and play around with it.
20:48So I'm not going to spend too much time on this yet because I think over over the course of
20:53me making videos for this stuff, you'll you'll naturally be able to uh play around with it.
20:57And yeah, we can kind of show you some of the bells and whistles of the platform.
21:01So all the charts are pretty straightforward.
21:04You can actually
21:05add controls as well.
21:06So these are like
21:07filter controls in Tableau
21:09or some other tool.
21:11These are actually quite nice, they're quite dynamic, they're a lot more flexible as well once you get into them.
21:16In terms of UI, there's a few things here that aren't actually UI.
21:19So
21:19obviously
21:20text, images, buttons, dividers, um, page breaks, value lists.
21:25progress
21:25ring, these all make sense.
21:27But plugin
21:28is actually
21:28a capability that allows you to bring charts as well.
21:30So it's not all just UI.
21:32And the very last one is
21:34some sort of
21:35I'm gonna say layout
21:37capabilities.
21:38So
21:38For example, you can have a drawer, something like this, which is kind of nice.
21:41So you close that, you click it, and it opens that.
21:44This is a really, really nice capability.
21:46Another layout item you can have is a popover.
21:49So
21:49these allow you to create things like this, and then you can put
21:52You can put um
21:53things into that popover.
21:54The way to do that is you select the item
21:57and you simply select the popover here in the drop down
22:00and then it goes into the
22:01popover setup and you can even make it take the the full space and then now you see it's available down here at the bottom if you go back to uh superstore
22:09there and now you open the popover
22:11there's your metric
22:12so you can create these really nice
22:14UI
22:14UX um capability.
22:16And then yeah, modals, tabbed containers, like I I just love how much they spoil us with all of these like
22:22logical things.
22:23Uh
22:23modals are my favorite.
22:25I absolutely love modals.
22:26Um you can create an action that opens a modal as well.
22:28So when you click on something, it opens a modal and in the modal you've got another um
22:32sort of view so sometimes of what I've done
22:34with clients is I I've clicked on uh like a record of
22:37clicked on a piece of information.
22:39I worked for a company that actually dealt with indices.
22:41When uh the person clicked on an indice, the modal window had a summary view of that indice
22:46and then it had a link out to another dashboard which showed you the detailed view of that indice.
22:51So you can do some really nice things without having to have multiple tabs inside of your workbook.
22:56What else do I like?
22:57Obviously, forms
22:58that's a whole separate video, input tables and stuff like that.
23:01Navigation just out of the box.
23:03All of these lovely things just sitting there.
23:05So
23:06Needless to say, there are lots of different ways of laying out and working with things in in in Sigma.
23:11Now the the last thing I've probably not done and everyone's going, hey, but Tim, like where are the actions?
23:16Where are the filters?
23:17How can I click on that and have it change everything else?
23:19Now, I will say
23:21philosophically, I don't like the way this is done in Sigma, but I also respect why it's done that way because it does open up the possibility to do some really, really wild things.
23:30So, as a simple example, I'm going to show you how to do this.
23:33And by the way, once you know how to do this, it just becomes like something you do.
23:36You almost forget like that it's a little bit different to the way you do it.
23:40Um, but
23:41If I click on this chart, let's say I want to uh have it so when I click on furniture, it goes out.
23:46Now
23:46this
23:46this field is the category field.
23:48So
23:48the way that I do this, if I click on the object.
23:51.
23:51And then I go down to category.
23:53Where is category gone?
23:54Did I move it to the top?
23:55Oh, it's here.
23:56If I click on this drop down, you'll see that you have a
23:59range of options.
24:00And one of them is going to be to create a control
24:03from this option.
24:03So you can see
24:04add a control.
24:05is the third option.
24:06There are shortcuts here as well.
24:07Now when we add a control it goes right to the top.
24:10Okay.
24:10And so the first thing you do is you say value source is going to be
24:13source column is going to be category.
24:15So now when I click on this you'll see nothing happens.
24:18It's not really loading anything up, but all the options are available there.
24:21Now
24:22reason nothing is loading there is because we
24:24haven't actually set it up to do anything.
24:26So this control
24:27has come from this
24:28If we go to the Actions tab, what we can do is on
24:31Select, we can set the control
24:34value for category superstore, this control.
24:37to be the column and so that's essentially what that's done.
24:40So now when I set that you'll see it sets the furniture and when I click out of it
24:44it goes back.
24:45So it's also applying to itself by default.
24:47That's something you can see.
24:48Now that category is done, if I go back to uh
24:51properties.
24:52And I go to settings, you'll see that you get the options for this control and how it works, the different ways
24:56settings work.
24:57And then if you go to targets, you can add additional targets.
25:00So at the moment it's applying itself.
25:02applying to itself and if you click the plus you can then just go and here again pay attention to the tabs you're on
25:07you can go ahead and select all the other things on the page
25:11it's very simple
25:12and now when you click on this
25:13all the other charts adapt
25:15And
25:16yeah, it's pretty it's pretty straightforward.
25:18What I will do is on this subcategory item, I will add category on color
25:22just to make it easier to see that this is changing along with this and it's got labels and some
25:27funny stuff that's happened there.
25:28Um
25:29so yeah let's click out of this
25:30um
25:31oh
25:31it's funny when I actually click on um
25:35uh
25:35the
25:36uh the category um
25:37although it is actually selecting correctly the the color legend is also changing it's not sticking to what i've actually
25:43set
25:44so
25:44these are all like um small things i i should build this a little bit better i'm also making a video
25:49thinking and talking at the same time so
25:51excuse the uh the habit
25:53Now that that's done, I'm gonna go ahead and move this to
25:57my uh data page one
25:58because it's actually a control for that page.
26:01And there we go, those
26:02are uh sort of dashboard.
26:04Now obviously this is not the most
26:05most beautiful dashboards, you can spend more time making it perfect.
26:08Let's go ahead and save it and see what the viewing experience is like.
26:11I'll just call this my workbook too
26:13because you know it is the second workbook I've built on this environment.
26:16And as soon as it's done that, it's basically created it and it saves it.
26:21It gets a little bit of a refresh.
26:22All the things get a refresh
26:24And what I will do is I'll go ahead and
26:27where is it gone?
26:28Where is it gone?
26:28Where do I go?
26:29View the published there.
26:30There we go.
26:31Go to published version.
26:31I always go to the wrong thing.
26:33And this is the published asset.
26:34So when a user is using this, this is exactly how it works.
26:37And they can save their own custom views like you would in any other.
26:41BI
26:41tool.
26:41And there's a side panel here as well that gives you additional context
26:44if they want to change how things work.
26:46It depends on the license you have.
26:48But needless to say, yeah, this is pretty much all
26:50So I've just done a very quick whistle stop tour.
26:53It's the worst possible demo to give to anyone, but I'm really making this video for people
26:58We spend the time in BI
26:59tools, you just want to get a quick peek, what's it like to build something really quickly in Sigma?
27:03Where are all the things?
27:04And maybe if you're using Sigma for the first time.
27:07This video is good enough for you to get your bearings and start to understand where everything is, and from there you can go on and build amazing things.
27:13So there you go.
27:14That's um pretty much it.
27:15Now there's a there's a bunch of
27:17this
27:18so many other things to go through.
27:20It's unbelievable.
27:21Um, I will spend a bit of time just sort of going through some of the things that actually make sense to go through.
27:25So this is the workspace.
27:27You've got um
27:27workspaces are
27:28like projects inside of um any other platform.
27:30You've obviously got the uh capability for templates
27:33Some of these come uh baked into the uh product already made by Sigma, but I do believe that it's going to be possible for um things that come through from Sigma Public at some point in the future.
27:43to to land in here that would be pretty cool.
27:46Um
27:46things that are shared with you, uh
27:48recent, favorites, trash.
27:50This this all makes sense I think to most people.
27:53In the admin panel, things take a
27:55more of an administrative turn.
27:57So I'm the admin here, so you've got a bunch of sort of basic capabilities
28:01and settings.
28:02You can get some information about your environment
28:05Your authentication and how that is all worked.
28:08Connections, remember these are all set up centrally.
28:10And by the way, when you go to hit uh create a connection, you can change the type, you can choose pretty much what you want.
28:16Um, what you don't have
28:18list
28:18is like a
28:19flat file upload if that makes sense
28:21because what they do is they piss they typically when any
28:24user uploads a CSV it actually loads it into whatever you set up here so that is like one dynamic to be careful of
28:29I've always think it's a little bit cheeky and because it's almost like
28:33you know you'll be either
28:34creating consumption
28:35just because of the outflow.
28:36But anyway
28:37It's a small detail and really, again, these flat files don't get that used.
28:41And actually, it's a good thing to have visibility of all of that stuff.
28:43Usage, this makes a ton of sense.
28:45You can see I've not used my environment well enough.
28:48um
28:48teams, uh
28:49account types, uh
28:50user attributes.
28:52We will spend our time covering all of these at some point over the next year or so.
28:57So
28:58There is just so much here.
29:00There's so much here to get into.
29:02Even things like plugins
29:03are available here.
29:04And so yeah, there's a whole world of
29:07capability.
29:07So one of the things I'm gonna do immediately as soon as I can is set up some MCP capabilities, make sure we have um a way to get the Claude
29:16capability
29:17set up.
29:17And so the whole point of having this environment is I actually have to do all that setup myself and I'll try and make videos and show you all how to do that.
29:23Um yeah, that's pretty much it.
29:25So yeah, thanks for joining me.
29:26Um
29:2730 minutes according to the recording timer.
29:29We did it as quickly as we possibly could
29:31Hopefully it was useful.
29:32I'm sure there's lots of hot takes.
29:34Um if you've used Sigma and you think this demo is awful, please let me know.
29:37Let me know.
29:38Teach me, teach me your ways.
29:39Although
29:40I've been using it for a year myself.
29:41Um
29:41I'm always learning and I know pretty much everyone has something to share.
29:44So please share those in the comments.
29:46If you're using something else, maybe it's Power BI, maybe it's Tableau, let me know what you think of Sigma.
29:50Is this something that looks interesting?
29:52There's so many things I love about it that are better than
29:55my experience that I've had in Tableau, but nonetheless.
29:58I think I think we live in such an amazing time in BI.
30:01There are so many good tools and I genuinely think if you don't believe this, you need to take some time, spend um you need to spend some time with BI tools
30:09because
30:09I genuinely
30:10think the floor on all BI
30:11tools has risen to a really high standard.
30:14And I'm talking about the floor.
30:15I'm not talking about the ceiling.
30:16The floor.
30:17The ceiling hasn't gone anywhere
30:19because AI has turned up and level
30:21the playing field.
30:22So
30:22genuinely, genuinely, if you thought you heard of a platform two years ago and you've not tried it since, try it again.
30:29If you thought you knew everything you needed to know about the BI platforms out there, go out, set up some trials and have a go.
30:36And yeah, if you want to, you can join me in that experience this week as we make more of these.
30:41Alright, thanks for watching.
30:42I'll see you in the next one.
Sigma | Data visualisation | Tool strategy 
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