Formatting chart elements

- [Instructor] When you create your chart or other visualizations in Tableau, the program applies its built-in formatting to your creation. As with most every other aspect of Tableau visualizations, you can format your chart's elements to emphasize particular aspects of your data, or just provide the appearance you want. In this movie, I will show you how to format chart elements. My sample file is the FormatElements workbook, and you can find it in the Chapter11 folder of your exercise files collection. The first thing you need to do is identify the element you want to change.

I have a very simple visualization here. And what I want to do is to change the color of my line, and also other aspects of it, so I will click the line to select it, and you notice that the closest data point was selected as well, that's fine. Then I'll go to the Marks card and click Color. Doing so displays a color palate, and from there I can select the color that I want to apply. Let's say that I'll go for a medium gray, so I'll go to the bottom of the left-hand column here, under gray, and when I click on it, you can see that Tableau has changed the color of the line.

If I want, I can also display labels related to the data points on the line, so if I click the line again, and then go to Label, I see that I have a number of options, I can check this box to show marked labels, they appear, and then I can format the text as well. So for example, because the numbers are a little bit closer together, if I want to make them smaller, then I can click Font, and go from say, nine point down to eight point.

And click away. I can also change other parts of the formatting, such as making it bold, changing color, and so on. I can also edit the axes of my visualization. So for example, the vertical axis shows total expenses. If I right click the axis, then I see a shortcut menu, and I can click Edit Axis. That gives me the Edit Axis dialogue box, and the name of the field is in square brackets, so I know I did it right.

There are a number of ways that I can change the range of the axis, in other words, the way that it displays its data. I can force the axis to include zero by making sure the Include Zero box is check. I can also have the same axis range for all rows and columns, or select to have independent axis ranges for each row or column. I can also select Fixed so that I have a fixed start and a fixed end. If you have ever seen a chart that doesn't start at zero on the vertical axis, that's what we're doing here.

None of my values are below 15,000, so rather than starting at zero, I will start at 15,000. So I'll type that into the box on the left hand side, press Tab, that looks good. And I will go ahead and click OK. When I do, you see that rather than starting at zero, I now have my data in a range starting at 15,000. If your values are close together, then starting the vertical axis at a value other than zero can amplify those differences, so that's a rhetorical point to watch out for.

If you want to emphasize the differences, then make sure that the values in your chart are close together, and not starting at zero can make sense. Do be aware, though, that doing so amplifies and, in fact, exaggerates the differences among your values, where if you started at zero, as we saw earlier, the differences would be much less significant. Modifying your chart is extremely useful if you find that the basic visualization is exactly what you need, that's fine, but if you want to change your axes, or perhaps change the appearance of your data, you can do that as well.