Making Visualizations that Look Great and Work Well

Tableau applies many good visual practices by default, and, for quick analysis, you likely won’t worry too much about changing many of these defaults. However, as you consider how to best communicate the data story you’ve uncovered, you’ll want to consider how to leverage everything, from fonts and text to colors and design, so that you can communicate well with your audience.

Tableau’s formatting options give you quite a bit of flexibility. Fonts, titles, captions, colors, row and column banding, labels, shading, annotations, and much more can all be customized to make your visualizations tell an impressive story.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Visualization considerations
• Leveraging formatting in Tableau
• Adding value to visualizations

As you think about why you should adjust a given visualization, there are several things to consider. We’ll...

Visualization considerations

Tableau employs good practices for formatting and visualization from the time you start dropping fields on shelves. You’ll find that the discrete palettes use colors that are easy to distinguish, the fonts are pleasant, the grid lines are faint where appropriate, and numbers and dates follow the default format settings defined in the metadata.

The default formatting is more than adequate for discovery and analysis. If your focus is analysis, you may not want to spend too much time fine-tuning the formatting until you are getting ready to share results. However, when you contemplate how you will communicate the data to others, you might consider how adjustments to the formatting can make a major difference to how well the data story is told.

Sometimes, you will have certain formatting preferences in mind or a set of corporate guidelines that dictate font and color selections. In these cases, you might set formatting options in a blank workbook...

Leveraging formatting in Tableau

We will focus on worksheet-level formatting in this chapter, as we’ve already covered metadata (data source-level formatting) in Chapter 2, Connecting to Data in Tableau, and we will cover dashboards and stories in Chapter 8, Telling a Data Story with Dashboards. However, it is beneficial to see the big picture of formatting in Tableau.

Tableau employs default formatting that includes default fonts, colors, shading, and alignment. Additionally, there are several levels of formatting you can customize, as shown in the following table:

Format Level	Description	Example
Locale	Based on the locale of the system (or a manually adjusted locale) and sets the default format used for currency and dates.	Setting the locale...

Adding value to visualizations

Now that we’ve considered how formatting works in Tableau, let’s look at some ways in which formatting can add value to a visualization.

When you apply custom formatting, always ask yourself what the formatting adds to the understanding of the data. Is it making the visualization clearer and easier to understand? Or is it just adding clutter and noise?

In general, try a minimalistic approach. Remove everything from the visualization that isn’t necessary. Emphasize important values, text, and marks, while de-emphasizing those that are only providing support or context.

Consider the following visualization, all using default formatting:

Figure 7.17: The default formatting is often great for data discovery and quick analysis but may be more cluttered than desired for clearly communicating and emphasizing the data story to others

The default format works fairly well, but compare that to this visualization:

...

Summary

The goal of formatting is to increase effective communication of the data at hand. Always consider the audience, setting, mode, mood, and consistency as you work through the iterative process of formatting. Look for formatting that adds value to your visualization and avoid useless clutter.

We covered quite a few options for formatting—from fonts, colors, lines, and more at the workbook level to formatting individual sheets and fields. We discussed how to customize formatting for numbers, dates, and null values and how to use these techniques to bring value to your visualizations.

With an understanding of how formatting works in Tableau, you’ll have the ability to refine the visualizations that you created in discovery and analysis into incredibly effective communication of your data story.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at how this all comes together on dashboards.

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