From the course: Tableau 10 Essential Training

Displaying the Summary Card - Tableau Tutorial

From the course: Tableau 10 Essential Training

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Displaying the Summary Card

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- [Instructor] You can summarize your data in many different ways in Tableau, but most formulas only provide one value at a time. If you want to display several summaries of your data, such as minimums, maximums and standard deviations, and all in one place, you can do that by displaying the Summary Card. To show you how to work with the Summary Card I will use the Summary Sard workbook. That's the sample file that you can find in the Chapter Five folder of your exercise files collection. This visualization contains a set of data, it's DailyGuests at 20 different cities in which my company has a hotel. And we have a grand total at the bottom. If I want to display a broader summary or a card that contains more summaries of the data, I can go to the worksheet menu and click show summary. Doing so displays the Summary Card on the right side of the visualization. And you see that I have a count of values. I have the sum, the average, minimum, maximum and median. Median again, is the middle value. If we were to sort the values in the table into ascending or descending order the median would be the value in the middle. Or in this case, because there are an even number of values, it would be the average of the two values in the middle. The count of 21, in this case, includes the grand total at the bottom. If you want to change which measures appear in the Summary Card you can move your mouse pointer over the title of the Summary Card and click the down arrow. And here you see all the different measures that are available to you. The first five are show by default. We have sum, average, minimum, maximum and median. If I wanted to hide the median then I could just click it again to remove the check mark, and it's gone from the summary. And in the same way, I can click the down arrow and if I want to show the standard deviation I can click that, and now I know how broadly my data is spread out. Notice that the text and values don't all appear inside the Summary Card. If I want to change its size, I can hover the mouse pointer over the left edge and drag to the left until the values are show properly. And when I'm done with the summary I can click the Summary Card's down arrow and click hide card. The Summary Card is a quick way to get a lot of measurements about your data. And when you're done you can hide it.

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