Tag: Mobile

Can you build a mobile KPI app?

Donna Coles1 Comment

For week 24 of #WOW2023, Kyle set this challenge involving dynamic zone visibility to build a mobile friendly KPI visual.

The charts being displayed are relatively simple, and use techniques applied several times in other challenges. Let’s tackle the charts for each ‘page’ one by one.

The Home page

For the Sales KPI

  • Double click into Columns and type MIN(1)
  • Add Sales to Label.
  • Set to Entire View
  • Adjust the MIN(1) axis to be fixed from 0-1
  • Adjust the text in the Label dialog to include the word Sales and resize fonts.
  • Align the label middle centre
  • Increase the size to the maximum value
  • Adjust the colour
  • Format the Sales measure to be $ with 0 dp.
  • Uncheck the show tooltip option from the Tooltip dialog
  • Hide the Min(1) axis
  • Ensure no row/column divider lines are displayed and remove all gridlines, zero lines, axis ticks etc

Duplicate this sheet and create equivalent ones for Profit and Orders – you’ll need to create a field

Count Orders

COUNTD([Order ID])

for the orders KPI.

For the Sales Sparkline

  • Add Sales to Rows
  • Add Order Date as a continuous (green) pill set at the Month level.
  • Adjust the colour
  • Hide both the axis
  • Remove all gridlines, zero lines, axis lines, row/column dividers
  • Adjust the tooltip
  • Format the background of the worksheet to light grey (#f5f5f5).

Duplicate the sheet and create equivalent ones for Profit and Orders.

You should have 6 sheets for the home page.

The Category Page

The Category page is displaying values for the last 12 months based on ‘today’. If building this in a business environment, I would make use of the TODAY() function. But to ensure the viz doesn’t break in future, I’ll hardcode today within a parameter

pToday

date parameter defaulted to 14 June 2023

I then need a field to restrict the records to report over

Last 12 months only

[Order Date]>= DATEADD(‘month’, -12, DATETRUNC(‘month’,[pToday])) AND
[Order Date]<DATEADD(‘month’, 1,DATETRUNC(‘month’,[pToday]))

this will return true if the Order Date associated to the record is greater than or equal to the 1st of the month, 12 months ago, based on the pToday parameter, and the Order Date is less that the 1st of next month, based on pToday.

For the Category KPI sheet

  • Add Last 12 months only to the filter shelf and set to true
  • Add Category to Rows
  • Double click on Columns and type in MIN(1)
  • Add Sales and Category to Label
  • Set to Entire View
  • Adjust the MIN(1) axis to be fixed from 0-1
  • Adjust the text in the Label dialog and resize fonts.
  • Align the label middle centre
  • Increase the size to the maximum value
  • Adjust the colour
  • Uncheck the show tooltip option from the Tooltip dialog
  • Hide the Min(1) axis
  • Hide the Category column
  • Ensure no row/column divider lines are displayed and remove all gridlines, zero lines, axis ticks etc

For the Category trend

  • Add 12 months only to filter and set to true.
  • Add Category and Sales to Rows
  • Add Order Date as a continuous (green) pill set at the Month level.
  • Adjust the colour
  • Add Sales to Label and show the min & max labels for each Category pane
  • Hide both the axis
  • Remove all gridlines, zero lines, axis lines, column dividers
  • Adjust the tooltip
  • Format the background of the worksheet to light grey (#f5f5f5).

The Segment Page

Repeat the same steps as described above for the Category Page, but replace any reference to Category with Segment.

Sales by State Page

  • Add State/Province to Rows
  • Add Sales to Columns
  • Sort by Sales descending
  • Adjust the Colour
  • Click on the Label shelf and Show mark labels
  • Remove all gridlines, zero lines, axis lines, row/column dividers
  • Adjust the tooltip
  • Format the background of the worksheet to light grey (#f5f5f5).

Building the navigator

I went down a slightly longwinded route for this, but its still an acceptable method. I knew deep down it could be done in 1 sheet, but my brain just wasn’t quite wired up properly when I built it.

I basically ended up building 2 sheets per symbol.

Firstly, you’ll need to add the symbol images into your shapes palette.

Create a new field

Selection – Home

“Home”

Also create fields

True

TRUE

and

False

FALSE

  • Add Selection – Home to the Text shelf.
  • Change the mark type to Shape and select the ‘home’ shape from your custom shape palette.
  • Set to Entire View, then adjust the Label alignment to be bottom centre.
  • Uncheck the show tooltip option from the Tooltip dialog
  • Format the background of the worksheet to medium grey
  • Add True and False to the Detail shelf.
  • Name the sheet Home – Unselected or similar

Duplicate sheet and change the background colour to teal or similar. Name this sheet Home – Selected or similar.

Repeat the process building 2 sheets for each image – you’ll need to create a Selection– Category field, a Selection – Segment field and a Selection – State field.

Building the calcs for Dynamic Zone Visibility

In order to hide and show various content ‘on click’ we will be making use of dynamic zone visibility. For this we need several boolean fields created along with a parameter

pSelection

string parameter, defaulted to Home

We then need

Is Home Selected

[pSelection] =’Home’

Is Home Not Selected

[pSelection] <>’Home’

Is Category Selected

[pSelection] =’Category’

Is Category Not Selected

[pSelection] <>’Category’

Is Segement Selected

[pSelection] =’Segment’

Is Segement Not Selected

[pSelection] <>’Segment’

Is State Selected

[pSelection] =’State’

Is State Not Selected

[pSelection] <>’State’

Building the Dashboard

We need to make use of multiple (nested) containers in order to get all the content positioned in the right place. I’m not going to go through step by step which containers to place where, but just summarise the key points.

For the ‘navigator’ strip, all 8 sheets need to be placed side by side in a horizontal container, and should be ordered so the ‘home’ sheets are first, then the ‘category’ ones etc. I adjusted the padding around each object to be 1px, and obviously didn’t show the title.

For each sheet, determine whether it should display or not by using the control visibility using value option on the layout tab, and selecting the appropriate field based on which ‘page’ the sheet relates to , and whether it’s the ‘active’ / selected sheet or not.

Eg for the teal Home – Selected sheet, the control visibility using value option should be driven based on the value of the Is Home Selected field, while the grey Home – Unselected sheet should be based on the value of the Is Home Not Selected field.

If all these are set correctly, only 4 of the 8 sheets should be visible at any one time – 1 teal and 3 grey.

For the ‘pages’ ie the set of sheets visible based on the selection in the navigator, a Horizontal Container should be used which in turn consists of 1 vertical container (for the sheets relating to the Home page), 2 horizontal containers (1 containing the 2 sheets side by side for the Category page, and 1 containing the 2 sheets side by side for the Segment page), and finally the Sales by State sheet should be added to the main horizontal container.

The Sales by State sheet should be visible based on the Is State Selected field. Each of the other containers should be visible based on their relevant field.

When putting all this together, the dashboard might look crowded and disorganised, but once the settings have been applied, only 1 page’ should be visible and then you can tweak padding and positioning if need be.

Capturing the selection

We need parameter actions to determine which card should display

Select Home

This parameter action should be applied when the Home – Selected or Home- Unselected sheets are clicked on, and it should set the pSelection parameter, passing in the Selection – Home field.

Equivalent parameter actions should then be created for each of the other Selected/Unselected sheets, passing in the appropriate Selection – xxx field.

Finally to ensure the navigation options don’t remain ‘selected’ on click (the images look darker) we need to apply filter actions to set the true field to false on each of the navigation buttons – this means 8 filter actions, which should look similar to this…

The source sheet selected on the dashboard should target the actual sheet itself (not the one on the dashboard).

Add a title and any other content onto the dashboard. Finally to ensure the viz works properly on a mobile, delete the phone layout option that is automatically listed on the dashboard tab.

My published instance is here. Check out Kyle’s solution to see the 1-sheet navigator.

Happy vizzin’!

Donna

Let’s practice using the Device Designer

Donna Coles1 Comment

Inspired by a discussion on Twitter that resulted in this blog post from Kevin Flerlage, Sean challenged us this week to build a viz that should adapt for different devices.

This makes use of the dashboard layout feature in Tableau (see here for further information). The focus on this week is really on the layouts, the charts are relatively straightforward, so I’m just going to summarise each one fairly quickly.

Note on the data

In the requirements, Sean talked about filtering the date to 2023 and assuming a YTD value where ‘today’ was 8th March 2023. The data set linked in the requirements didn’t contain that information. I chose instead just to use the 2022.4 version of Superstore I had. As this challenge wasn’t going to contain any complicated table calcs/LODs I wasn’t worried that my numbers might not match.

Filtering the data

To restrict the information based on Sean’s requirements, I created a parameter to represent ‘today’

pToday

date parameter defaulted to 8 March 2022

I then created a field to use to ensure I only counted data up to that date.

Dates to Include

[Order Date] <= [pToday]

I added this to the Filter shelf and set to True. In addition I added Order Date to the Filter shelf, and selected Years > 2022. Both these fields I set to apply to all worksheets using this datasource.

Building the KPIs

Format Sales and Profit to be $ with 0 dp. If it doesn’t exist, create

Profit Ratio

SUM([Profit])/SUM([Sales])

and format this to % to 1 dp.

Add Measure Names to Filter and filter to the three measures (Sales, Profit and Profit Ratio). Add Measure Names to Columns and Measure Values to Text. Re-order as required. Add Measure Names to Text too and format the Text as required, Remove row dividers and hide the column headers.

Building the bar chart

Add Sub-Category to Rows and Profit Ratio to Columns and sort descending, Add Sales to Colour and add Profit to Tooltip. Adjust tooltip. Hide the Sub-Category column heading from displaying (right click > Hide field labels for Rows). Change the title of the viz.

Building the Map

Double click State/Province to automatically generate a map of the USA (if it doesn’t display, check the location is set to USA – Map menu > Edit Locations).

Add Profit Ratio to Colour and add Sales and Profit to Tooltip. Adjust tooltip.

Remove all the background map layers by selecting Background Layers from the Map menu, and unchecking all the options listed on the menu that displays on the left hand side.

Hide the ‘unknown’ indicator if its displaying (right click > hide indicator).

Stop the map options (that allow zoom & pan etc) from displaying by selecting Map Options from the Map menu and unchecking all the options that are presented.

Remove row and column dividers and change the title of the viz.

Building the Scatter Plot

Add Sales to Columns and Profit to Rows. Add Order ID to Detail and Profit Ratio to Colour. Make the zero lines slightly more prominent and title the viz.

On a new sheet, add Customer Name and Product Name to Rows. Add Measure Names to Columns and Measure Values to Text. Add Measure Names to Filter and restrict to Quantity, Sales and Profit. Reorder the measures as required.

Add subtotals -from the Analysis menu select Totals > Add all Subtotals.

Set the row banding to none. Centre align the Customer Name column. Name the sheet Order Details or similar

Back on the scatter plot sheet, adjust the Tooltip and add a reference to the Order Details sheet by using the Insert > Sheets > select sheet

How well the viz in tooltip displays can often be a bit of trial and error. You may need to adjust the width and height properties on the referenced sheet in the tooltip. Also, sometimes setting the Fit property of the Order Details sheet may help too.

Building the default dashboard

Create a dashboard sized Generic Desktop. Set the background of the dashboard to grey (Format menu > Dashboard) Arrange the four vizzes on the dashboard. You may need to use horizontal and vertical containers to help you align everything where you want. Add padding around all the viz objects (I set mine to 10). Hide the title of the KPI viz. For the other 3 vizzes, set the background to white, so the title is also in white.

Set filter actions on both the bar chart and map, by selecting the object and then choosing Use as Filter from the context menu.

Click on the bar and check the other vizzes all filter. Do the same with the map. Now we’re ready to apply the different device layouts.

Creating the Tablet layout

The dashboard initially created is the Default dashboard, and we can tell this by looking at the left hand pane.

To add a new layout for a generic tablet, click the Device Preview button.

A Device Preview bar will appear at the top of the dashboard, Scroll through the Device type options until Tablet is displayed. By default the model should already be Generic Tablet. A border will display over the dashboard which indicates the boundaries of the dashboard based on the dimensions of the device. Click the Add Tablet Layout button.

The dashboard will immediately be resized to fit the boundary. Some of the vizzes are squashed up. Manually readjust so everything is displayed as required. A Tablet option will have appeared on the left hand side, and you can now toggle between Default and Tablet (click on the words in the left hand pane) and see the dashboard adjusting.

Creating the phone layout

Click on the Phone option (top left under Tablet), or scroll through and select Device Type = Phone.

By default, everything on the default dashboard is displayed on the Phone layout, which is obviously a portrait layout, optimised for scrolling down.

We don’t want the title, or the Scatter plot on this layout. To remove them, click the locked padlock icon and it will change to an unlocked icon, and the dashboard will be editable..

Remove the title object and the scatter plot object. In my case I also removed my footer information. Adjust the bar chart so its a bit longer, so the bars and labels are readable. It doesn’t matter that it will extend outside the bounds.

And that’s it – you now have 3 layouts for a single dashboard. Publish the viz to Tableau Public, then test out by accessing the viz from a tablet and/or your phone. Tableau will detect the type of device you’re accessing from, and show the most suitable display. Below are images of my viz accessed from my laptop, and on my mobile.

My published viz is accessible here.

Happy vizzin’!

Donna

Can you design for an automatic phone layout?

Donna ColesLeave a comment

Designing for mobile isn’t something I inherently think about when building a viz, so, this week’s #WOW challenge from Lorna was a useful reminder on the inbuilt functionality Tableau has to make a display typically aimed at a laptop user, also render well on a mobile display with minimal effort.

Tableau allows you to choose a variety of device layouts and define specific instances of how the sheets should display on each, but this challenge was focused on the Automatic Phone Layout option, where the aim was to build a 1200×800 dashboard, which automatically rendered vertically when viewed on mobile. Lorna referenced this Tableau blog as a starting point, which is definitely worth a read.

YTD Summary by Sales

In the requirements, Lorna mentions ‘last 2 years YTD’, but given the dataset used contains years 2016-2019, and the challenge wasn’t really focused on this area, I just presented sales for the whole year as follows :

  • YEAR(Order Date) to Rows sorted by Order Date descending (so 2019 is listed first)
  • SUM(Sales) on Text with a Quick Table Calculation of Percent Difference. By default, this calculation will work ‘down’ the table, so we need to edit the table calc so it is relative to the Next record, rather than Previous.
  • Format this field using custom formatting of ▲0%;▼0% ( I use this site to copy & paste the shape images from)
  • Add another copy of SUM(Sales) to Text and then modify the text to format as required.
  • To only display Years 2018 & 2019 either
    • Filter the Order Date to exclude 2016, and additional filter the SUM(Sales) % difference table calculation to only show non-null values
  • or select year 2016 and 2017, right-click and choose Hide
  • Add YEAR(Order Date) to Colour and adjust to suit
  • Apply formatting to remove row/column/grid lines/ row banding. hide labels and rotate headings
  • Change the title of the sheet to YTD

Repeat all of this to create a version for Profit.

Sales Trend Line

This is pretty much Desktop 101 – one of the first charts you’re likely to build when training on Desktop 🙂 So here’s just the picture 🙂

Again repeat to create a version for Profit.

Top 10 Products by Sales Bar Chart

In the requirement Lorna stated (and displayed a title for) Top 10 Customers by Sales, but the chart displayed in her solution showed Products.

I chose therefore to show the same as Lorna (with a corrected title). The instruction in the requirements was also to use Sets. So to do this

Top 10 Products by Sales

Right click on Product Name, select Create -> Set and adjust as below

Then to build the chart

  • Add Sales to Rows
  • Product Name to Columns, sorted by Sales descending
  • Sales to Text
  • Order Date to Filter set to 2018 & 2019 only
  • Top 10 Products by Sales to Filter

At this point you might find you only have 9 rows displayed, and this is because the 10 largest product sales are considering all years, before then filtering by the years. We need to set the Order Date filter to be Added to Context (right-click on pill). This will force Tableau to filter the data by the relevant years. and then work out the Top 10. When added to context the pill will be grey rather than blue on the filter shelf.

Apply formatting as required

Top & Bottom 10 Products by Profit

Similar to above, I created a Top 10 Products by Profit set and also a Bottom 10 Products by Profit set ( just change the ‘Top’ drop down to select Bottom).

Top & Bottom Products by Profit

To the get a Top 10 & Bottom 10 set, you can create a combined set. I can’t recall if I’ve ever come across this before… I think it was probably part of some #WoW a long time ago… it certainly isn’t something I use regularly.

Right click on one of the Profit sets created and select Create Combined Set and choose your sets in the presented dialog. In this instance we want all members from both sets.

To build the chart

  • Add Profit to Rows
  • Product Name to Columns, sorted by Profit descending
  • Profit to Text
  • Order Date to Filter set to 2018 & 2019 only and added to context
  • Top & Bottom Products by Profit to Filter

We need a ‘header’ to label the Top & Bottom. I added Top 10 Products By Profit to Rows, and placed it in front of Product Name. This works since the sets are mutually exclusive – no product can be in both the top 10 and the bottom 10. This will display header values of In or Out, which I then aliased to display Top 10 or Bottom 10 (right clicked on ‘In’ and Edit Alias). Then just format to suit.

Building the Dashboard

We’ve got all the component parts , so now we want to add to the dashboard in such a way that the sheets will display vertically when viewed on mobile, even though the requirements stipulate a 1200 x 800 ‘desktop’ type layout.

The requirements also state to use the Automatic Phone Layout option only, which means you shouldn’t have a need to ‘fiddle’ with how the components are displayed when in mobile view.

Basically you’re building on the Default view

but when you click the Phone option, the padlock remains ‘locked’ ie the ‘automatic’ view, and all the objects display in the right order on top of each other.

The key to this, is knowing the fact that the automatic phone layout follows an A-Z approach – across the page from left to right, then down and across from left to right again.

I arranged my objects in rows as

  • Row 1 = Title
  • Row 2 = Heading
  • Row 3 = Sales YTD, Sales Trend, Top 10 Products
  • Row 4 = Heading
  • Row 5 = Profit YTD, Profit Trend, Top & Bottom 10 Products

All charts were set to Fit Entire View, and I didn’t spend any time creating specific layout containers – I just dropped the objects in the places I wanted.

This subsequently presented as below when I clicked the Phone option on the Dashboard tab

The part I found most tricky was getting the Top & Bottom 10 Products chart to display the detail I could see when viewing Lorna’s solution. I simply ended up needing to adjust the font sizes to be size 6 on the labels and the displayed product names, and moving the column sizer so I had enough of the bar to display.

My published version is here.

Happy vizzin’! Stay safe!

Donna