hi! I’m Kyle, hope you’ve been good and great, great and good. Today we’ll be covering how to create hierarchies in Tableau. If you missed the previous videos in this playlist, be sure to check those out in the description below or in the annotation in the top right corner of the screen. But if you’re all caught up, let’s get started. Hierarchies in Tableau allow users to drill up or roll down views as needed so that you can not only have high level, bird’s eye view, executive sort of summaries, while also having very niche, specific, nitty gritty details.
Luckily, creating them is super simple. Continuing our tutorial series with the same set of data we connected back in episode 1, let’s say I want to create a high level view of our data by website, and also drill down to specific pages within the websites. So in this hierarchy, “page” is nested underneath “website.” So we’ll start by right clicking website, go to hierarchy, and then “create hierarchy.” First, we have to give it a name, make sure you give it something identifiable and descriptive, for our example we’ll call it “Sites & Pages,” then hit ok.
Now we have this new icon that looks like a little org chart, which is the icon for hierarchies. The very first one is the top of your hierarchy, and as you add more those will be underneath whatever you have on top. So in this instance, website is the top, which is what we want, and now we just have to put “Page” underneath that. To do this, I just grab “Page” and drag and drop it underneath “website.” Quick tip: you can see with this black line where it’s going to end up, so if I drag and drop things here it would put page ABOVE website, which we do NOT want, so instead I’ll move just a smidge further down and then - there we go, it’s underneath website.
So now in the Sites & Pages hierarchy we have website first and then page below it, which is what we want. So now that I have this here, I’ll make a little table to show off this data. Just like we did before, I’ll throw Website into the Rows box. I’ll put measure names under filters so I can filter things down to only the bits and pieces I actually want to see, then hit OK. And then I’ll put measure names into the columns box, and then I’ll put measure values into text, which is in the “Marks” box.
I’ll rearrange the measure values as I like, and there we go. So now I have this nice lovely table, we can see that test site 1 has a bit over 11k views and just under 700 conversion, test site 2 has just under 700k views, this is all good info, and great to present to your exec team. But, if say, I wanted to get a bit more down to the nitty gritty and see what specific pages within these sites were getting views, I can hover over the website column header and you’ll see this little plus icon appear.
If I click on that it’ll expand our hierarchy out to show the individual pages for each site. Now we can see the break out of the same measure values but for each and every one of the pages under our two websites. If I want to switch things back, I can hover over that column header again and you’ll see the plus sign is now a minus sign. If I click on that, it’ll reverse things back to the broad overhead view. Alternatively, instead of clicking on the column header, if I look in the “rows” box towards the top of the screen, it also has a plus and minus box in it Clicking that performs the same function.
And just like that, you’ve created a hierarchy. Thanks for watching! Don’t forget to check out the rest of our Tableau videos here on this playlist, or if you’d rather see a bunch of other BI tools, click on this button here to visit technologyadvice.com to see the top options available today. Thanks again, now go be good and great, great and good.
