Show Me Exercise 1

Show Me is a powerful component of Tableau that arranges selected and active fields into the places required for the selected visualization type. The Show Me toolbar displays small thumbnail images of different types of visualizations, allowing you to create visualizations with a single click. Based on the fields you select in the Data pane and the fields that are already in view, Show Me will enable possible visualizations and highlight a recommended visualization.

It does this with visual analytics best practices built in, giving you the ability to quickly see a variety of visualizations that might answer your questions.

Explore the features of Show Me by following these steps:

1. Navigate to the Show Me sheet.

2. If the Show Me pane is not expanded, click on the Show Me button in the upper right of the toolbar to expand the pane.

3. Press and hold the Ctrl key while clicking on the Postal Code, State, and Profit fields in the Data pane to select each of those fields. With those fields highlighted, Show Me should look like this:

Figure 1.25: The Show Me interface

Notice that the Show Me window has enabled certain visualization types such as text tables, heat maps, symbol maps, filled maps, and bar charts. These are the visualizations that are possible given the fields already in the view, in addition to any selected in the Data pane.