Most executives (and by most, I mean all of them), prefer receiving tables that contain
totals and subtotals.
This makes it easier for them and helps them digest information in a faster way.
In this lesson, we will learn how to add totals and subtotals to our Tableau tables.
That’s nice because the table we have been working on in the last few videos doesn’t
contain totals for 2016 and 2017.
We’ll add them in this video.
That’s fairly easy to do.
I’ll go to “Analysis”, then “Totals” and will select “Show column grand totals”.
The totals we just added are for the entire period 2016 and 2017.
That’s not really useful, is it?
Whenever a person is interested in a company’s sales or gross profit, they want to know how
much it made in a specific year, and whether it performed better than the year before.
A company will also want to know how its year’s sales compare to other companies.
So, I’ll go to “Analysis”, “Totals”, and unclick the “Show column grand totals”
to remove the total we just added.
What I can do differently the second time around is opt for “add all subtotals”,
and this will give me the total figures for 2016 and 2017 separately.
Quite nice, right?
Now we can read the table easily.
The fictitious numbers we see here help us compare 2016 and 2017, and give us a good
idea of what the actual sales were for that period.
In our next lesson, we’ll add percentage gross margin to our table.
Thanks for watching!