Business Finance – Economics First Tableau Assignment

Assn #5 – First Tableau Assignment

Updated October 12, 2023 page 1

The instructions for downloading the data file and setting up your Tableau file are provided in the Canvas assignment. Now it’s time to crunch some numbers! Task #1: Sales by Year

• On a new sheet, create a crosstab visualization that will show us how the sales of our various products are doing over time.

• The rows should be the furniture items and the columns should be the year (2017 through 2019).

• The body of the crosstab should display the total sales (SUM of the Sales Price measure). • Format your results with zero decimal places. • Name this sheet "Task 1 – Sales by Year" • Please save your work now (and after every task but I won't offer the reminder again).

Task #2: Create a new field for Profit

• Now to investigate whether or not we’re actually making a profit on those items. • Create a new calculated field. Call it Profit. • Profit is calculated as sales price minus cost. • There is no visualization for this task – you’re just creating a new calculated field.

The TA will examine the calculated field when grading this task. Task #3: Profit by Item for 2019

• On a new sheet, create a bar graph visualization — horizontal bars, one for each furniture item, length of bar controlled by total profit.

• Setup a filter so that only 2019 data is displayed. • Sort the bars so the longest is on top. • Modify the tooltip to display: item, total profit, total sales, and quantity sold. Also fix

the wording of the tooltip to be more "user friendly" than standard (see below).

Assn #5 – First Tableau Assignment

Updated October 12, 2023 page 2

• Your visualization for task 3 should match the one displayed below.

Be sure to re-create all aspects… just as shown above.

• Name this sheet "Task 3 – Profit by Item for 2019" Task #4: Profit by Item over Time

• That bar chart is disturbing! Why did we make so little on beds last year? Are there other items that have had bad years? Let’s find out.

• On a new sheet, create a highlight table visualization as follows: o Furniture items on the rows; years on the columns. o Body displays total profit, formatted as zero decimal places with comma

seperators. • Configure the colors of your highlight table to use three stepped colors. Choose a color

palette that will make the most profitable and least profitable cells really stand out. • Name this sheet "Task 4 – Profit by Item over Time"

Task #5: Create a new field that indicates if a sale is profitable or not

• It might help if we could filter out all of the unprofitable sales transactions in our visualizations as we continue investigating this situation.

• Create a new calculated field. Call it ProfitableOrNot

Assn #5 – First Tableau Assignment

Updated October 12, 2023 page 3

• For each row, if the profit is greater than zero then the sale was profitable, so your field should contain the value “Yes.” If profit is zero or less, then your field contains “No.”

• Hint: Logical formulae were demonstrated in 09.09-Bar Graphs. • Like task 2 – no visualization for this task; the TA will evaluate your calculated field.

Task #6: Identifying Whose Sales are Unprofitable

• Let’s try to identify which salespeople are selling so much furniture at a loss. To do that, we’ll create a packed bubble visualization that uses your new calculated field.

• On a new sheet, create a packed bubble visualization as follows: o We only want to see unprofitable sales on this viz. Use a filter. o Your visualization should have one bubble per salesperson. o The size of the bubble should be set using the number of records … that’ll tell us

how many times each salesperson sold product at a loss. o Update the ToolTip. We want it to display two facts: the salesperson’s name and

the number of times that salesperson sold product at a loss. By default, it says “Number of Records.” The average reader of this report won’t know what a record is, so edit your tooltip to say something more descriptive when you hover over a bubble.

• Name this sheet “Task 6 – Identifying Whose Sales are Unprofitable”

Assn #5 – First Tableau Assignment

Updated October 12, 2023 page 4

Task #7: Top 10 Customers • Now that we’ve gotten to the bottom of the sales problem, let’s look for some good

news! Create a visualization that gives us some data about our top 10 customers. • On a new sheet, create a crosstab visualization, configured as follows:

o Customer name on the rows o We want to see two analyses for the customers:

§ total quantity of items purchased § total sales price, formatted as 0 decimal places and comma separators.

o Setup filtering so only the top 10 customers are displayed. o Sort the results so the highest total sales is on the top.

• Name this sheet “Task 7 – Top 10 Customers”

Congratulations! You’ve completed the assignment. Save your work and submit it on Canvas.

Sheet1