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Binning Measures

Measures are typically fields containing numeric information such as Sales and Budget. When you place a Measure onto the Rows or Columns shelf it creates an axis. However, sometimes you may want to organize the values of a measure into specific groups. For example, suppose you have a measure that holds the ages of customers ranging from 18 to 90. Rather than break a view down by every age, you may want to analyze based on age groups (18 to 25, 26 to 33, etc.). You can create these ranges by binning the data.

Here's how it works.

Say you are analyzing the sales performance for a superstore. One way to look at sales is in the form of a histogram so you can see the amount of sales that are less than $500, between $500 and $1000, and so on. To build a histogram, you first have to bin the Sales Total values into categories.

To create bins:

1. Right-click the measure you are interested in (in this case Sales Total) in the Data window and select Create Bins.
Right click a measure in the Data window and select Create Bins.
2. In the Create Bins dialog box, specify the size of the bins. In this example, type 500 into the Size of Bins text box.
Specify the size of bins.
You can use the range of values area of the dialog box to load the minimum and maximum values for the field you are binning. This helps you select a bin size that makes sense for your data. Click the Load button to see these values.
3. Click OK. A new dimension is created called Sales Total (bin).
A new dimension is created.
4. Drag the new Sales Total (bin) dimension to the rows shelf. Notice that sales values are broken into categories of 500. Each bin label designates the lower limit of the range of numbers assigned to the bin. The lower limit is inclusive. For example, the bin labeled 1,000 contains numbers greater than or equal to 1,000, but less than 1,500.
Drag the new dimension to the Rows shelf.
5. Drag the Sales Total measure to the Columns shelf and select Count as its aggregation.
Drag the Sales Total measure ot the Columns shelf and select Count as its aggregation.
The final view is shown below. Each bar represents the number of transactions with sales amounts within each bin. We can now see that the majority of transactions at this superstore are for sales less than $500.
Histogram showing the number of sales transactions within each sales amount category (broken down by every $500).
Use Show Me! Alternatives to automatically create a histogram. Simply select the measure of interest in the Data window, click Show Me! Alternatives on the toolbar, and select the histogram option in the subsequent dialog box. To learn more about Show Me! click here.
 

To Learn More

  • Learn more about binned data by searching for Bins in the Tableau Online Help.
  • Contact Tableau Technical Support at: (206) 633 3400 x2
  • Learn this trick and many more at the Tips and Tricks index. Don't forget to bookmark it.