Assignment A.

6 - Milligan Chapter 3

Student Name: < Replace this text with your name >

Week 2 - Milligan Chapter 3

Welcome to your hands-on activity! This assignment invites you to work with Tableau using a mix of
generated and real-world data. You will:
● Download the attached spreadsheet and upload those data sets into Tableau. If you need help
loading your data sources, refer to Assignment A.2 for help.
● Go through this document and use Tableau to answer all the questions listed below. Where
applicable, paste screenshots into the template below.
● When you are ready, complete the online quiz which verifies your homework. You are welcome
to refer to this document when you complete the quiz.
● You are welcome to use the quiz results to update your homework file.
● When you have completed the online quiz, submit the Word document.
● Remember, you can always reach out for help to your FA or instructor if needed.
● If you need to adjust the size of your visualizations to match the options in the questions, use
the “Format”->”Cell size” options. For example, “Ctrl+Shift+B” on a Windows computer will
make the visualization bigger and “Ctrl+Up” will make it taller.

The spreadsheet attached to this assignment contains five datasets, each within its own sheet on the
Excel doc:
1. A dataset created by a local company tracking the participation of runners for an event at
branches within different states
2. The goals of each state branch in the above data set
3. A spreadsheet of fake products with the arrival and sale dates to keep track of how long items
stay on the shelves for
4. Population statistics of colleges within the United States
5. Video game sales in the last few decades for North America, Europe, and Japan

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Question 1 – Setting Goals with Bullet Graphs

First, we are going to make a bullet graph, using the data from sheet 1 and the goals in sheet 2. While
loading the data, be sure to set the relationship to “state” as in the photo below:

Now create a bullet graph, using the “count of the number of participants” in sheet 1 in Columns and
the “States” measure in Rows. Sort this in decreasing order using the sort icon

. Then use the “Goal” measure from sheet 2 to complete the bullet
graph by adding corresponding goal markers to each “state” data. Which of the following most closely
resembles your chart?

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 Question 1 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

Question 2 – Bar in Bar Chart

Next create a bar-in-bar chart using the same runner data from sheet 1. As before, place the “count of
the data” on Columns and the “State” measure on Rows. Drag the “Year” dimension to both the color
and size tabs on the Marks window. Also make the 2018 data the smaller of the two bars. If you need
help with this, look at the Milligan book, page 88. Sort both the year marks (color and size) in ascending
order. Change the sort order of the bar graph by state in descending order. Your legend and Marks
window should look like the following (don’t worry if the colors don’t match):

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 Which of the
following
charts look
most similar to
your graph?

Question 2 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

Question 3 – Gantt Chart

Now look at the product data in sheet 3. We wish to see how long specific products stay on the shelves
of our store. To do this, put “Product Name” on Rows and “Sale Date” on Columns. For the “Sale Date”,
we want to have the exact, continuous date in our chart. To do this, click the arrow on the “Sale Date”
tab that you dragged to Columns and click on Exact Date in the menu:

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 Then
create
a

calculated field called “Date on Shelf” by going to the Analysis menu and selecting Create Calculate Field.
This will bring up a dialogue box like above on the right. Copy the code in the box (provided below) to
create a value measuring the difference between the “Arrival Date” and the “Sale Date”. Then place this
value on the Size tab on the Marks window and set the value to COUNT instead of SUM.

DATEDIFF('day',[Arrival Date],[Sale Date])

Which of the following looks most like your chart?

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 Question 3 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

Question 4 – Tree Map

Using the college population data from sheet 4, drag the “State” measure to the Color tab in the Marks
window. Then drag the “Population” measure to the Size tab and “Name” dimension to the Detail tab in
the same window. This should generate a tree map showing the population of colleges in each state
corresponding to a different color.

Which of the following looks most like the chart you generated?

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 Question 4 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

Question 5 – Pie Chart

We will be making a pie chart using the same video game data from sheet 5. We want to visualize the
contribution of each game genre to the global sales. First, in the Marks menu, change the dropdown
arrow to “Pie”. Now, drag the “Genre” dimension to both the Color tab and the label tab in Marks, and
the “Global Sales” measure to both the Angle and Text tab.

Which of the following looks most like your chart?

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 Question 5 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

Question 6 – Circle Charts

We will now create a simple circle chart using the runner data from sheet 1, specifically looking at the
data from California, New Jersey, and Texas. This allows us to see the distribution of runners for each
state, since we can see the individual data points on a line. To do this, drag the “State” measure to Rows
and the “Miles” measure to Columns. You will notice that the system automatically totals the number of
miles, SUM(miles), but want to see each value. Right click on the SUM(Miles) pill in the Columns area
and select “dimension”. In the Marks window, switch the dropdown menu to Circle instead of
automatic, like below:

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Drag the “State” measure onto the Filters window and select only California, New Jersey, and Texas,
since these are the only states we want to see data for. Then drag the “State” measure onto the Color
tab of the Marks window to color each row differently. Lastly, create an average bar by going into the
Analytics Tab and dragging “Average Line” over the chart. You want to place it on the “Cell” option as
seen below:

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Which of the following does your chart look most like?

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 Question 6 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

Question 7 – Jittering
Notice that the charts generated in the previous question are a bit cluttered… It is hard to take away
meaningful analysis with the data as it is. To counter this, we can employ a technique called jittering,

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which creates space between the points. One way to do this is to go to the Analysis menu in the toolbar
and click Create Calculated Field. This should give a box like below:

Name the calculation anything you want (here I just chose “Index”) and type “INDEX()” in the box. This
calls the built in table calculation INDEX(), which defines a new axis for our data and spreads out the
points vertically. This should create a chart that looks like the following.

Start with a new worksheet, drag “Miles” to the rows, and right click to change it to a dimension. You
will see the entire range of miles run for all employees (0 to 200)

Now, apply a filter of only the state of California. We can see that the range is still 0-200, but there are
fewer lines, however, some are still very close to each other.

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Now, drag the “Index” measure that you created into the Columns area.

Change the Marks type to circle and you should now see a scatterplot like below:

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Last, drag the “Ch_3_Data_Set_1 (Count)” over to the size marks.

This could be helpful if the state wants to provide a different award for every mile count run by the
employees. They would need to know what they are and how many award levels there are. They can do
this by using the “index” feature which will assign a number to each number of miles. By hovering over
the data point, you can see the miles ran, how many people ran that number of miles and what the
index count was.

For example, there is one employee who ran 0 miles, they are index 1. The next employee ran 5 miles
and is index 2. When there are three employees who ran the same number of miles (39) for example, it
doesn’t matter, the index is still 14. The next index, 15, is one person who ran 46 miles.

Using the graph you created, what is the count of indexes in California? (Hint, look at the highest index
to know the count):

A. 198

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 B. 73
C. 200
D. Unable to determine

Question 7 Answer:

Question 8 – Histograms

Another way to visualize distribution data is to use a histogram. Let’s use the same data as before, the
runner data in sheet 1. First select the “Miles” measure in the Data tab on the left. Opening the Show
Me tab on the top right will give you the option to create a histogram (the chart circled in red):

Click on this and Tableau will automatically generate a histogram with the number of bins on the
Columns. In the Data Tab, you will see a new Measure called “Miles (bin)”. This determines the number
of bins in your histogram. To change this, select this and click on the arrow to the right of the text “Miles
(bin)”. In the dropdown menu, click “Edit”, which should then give you the dialogue box in the figure
above. Here you can play with the settings of your bins.

Set the bin size to 20 and press OK.

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Which of the following looks like your chart?

Question 8 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

Question 9 – Scatterplot

Scatterplots are essential to visualize and understand the relationship between two measures. Here we
wish to use the video game dataset on sheet 5 to compare the sale of games in North America as a
function of their ranking.

To do this, put the “Rank” measure on Columns and “NA Sales” measure on Rows. Tableau will default a
sum calculation for both measures, so you need to right click on both and change both to dimensions.
This will automatically generate a scatterplot. Lastly, to label our plot, put the “Name” dimension on the
Label tab in Marks.

Which of the following does your chart look the most like?

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 Question 9 Answer:

<<insert your screenshot>>

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