Getting Started with Visuals

To visualize data in count we use visual cells. We create these from our data and then we customize them depending on what we would like to show. Let's look at the different ways that you can add visuals to Canvas. The first is using the low code menu from the toolbar at the bottom, selecting visual and clicking on the canvas. Here you will see an empty visual cell and some options to start customizing this. Another option is to use the data panel in the left hand side. By clicking a data connection or a catalog, you will see the tables and fields within and you can drag these fields onto the canvas. This provides auto generated visuals for you to see the shape of your dataset. Here, I can see the date range within my data. Here, I can see the most commonly cited artist within the dataset as well. So that can be a really nice way to quickly get started. You can also use these as the base of a visualization that you customize further. Another way that you can add a visualization is from an existing cell. So here, I've just uploaded this CSV, but this could be a SQL Python cell or another visual. By hovering over one edge and clicking add cell, you can navigate to visual, and we have this familiar view, which is an empty visual and some options. So for the purposes of this exercise, let's go back to the empty one that we added. The first thing we would want to do is decide what data to base this on. I'm going to choose a database, the local one. I'm just gonna choose that CSV, which is my sales data. I also want to choose the template that I would like to begin with. I think that I will go for a simple column chart. Now we can see some channels that we can populate with fields from our dataset. I'm simply going to drag over product and price to the x and y axis. We can see the beginning of a chart here that we would like to customize further. First of all, you may notice that my field price is now showing as total price, and this is the default aggregation. If I wanted to change this logic, I just click on these three dots, and I could change this to the average, min, max. There's various options I could go through, but I'm happy with total price. This is great, but I have to scroll, which isn't ideal. So one option is I could make my visual cell bigger. Or if I'm happy with the size, I could use this option here for the chart to fill the available space. And this is now fixed to my visual cell, and it will scale with it. The next thing I notice is I can't actually see what these represent. I can right click on these labels, and I have an option to rotate them. This is starting to look good. This is quite difficult to read. It's worth knowing that if you regret your initial choice, you can select a different visual style and continue editing. For this one, we also have a shortcut. So I'm just gonna flip that visual. This looks much better and you can see that my type now has switched. The other thing I might want to do is just put this in a more sensible order so it's easier to read and a really easy way to do that is just clicking on the axis that I would want to sort by. So let's look at the other options. We have a color option. If I would like to change the static color of a chart, I just click on this icon. I can drag and choose a new color, and I can also change the opacity of this. The other option for color is that I map a column to it. If I were to take, for example, product type, we can see that it has mapped this across and it's added a legend as well. The next channel we'll look at is label. I can unhide the label by clicking on this eye icon, and it will show me the values based on the axis of my chart. I can customize this further. If I wanted to show different value on there, I could just drag a column over to my label field. I'm happy with this. I think perhaps I could improve the formatings. Within my axis, I can right click and choose to edit the axis. We have a format section, and I can change this to currency. This has some more options. You can see this is quite long, so perhaps I will take the decimals away and maybe display units. I'll put as thousands. So now we can see that my axis and my labels are tidied up. I also have the option to edit these the format of these independently if I wanted them to display differently. The final channel here is filters. If I would like to see a subset of my data, I can drag on a field that I would like to filter on, change the logic that I would like to use, and then select or enter some options. Here, we can see a smaller subset of the data. If at any time I would like to remove that or any field from my setup, I can just drag it. The final thing I want to do with my chart here is just add a title. This appears in the top left of my chart, and I can adjust the styling and font as required. We've covered the basic building blocks that you need to be able to create any of these visual templates. The other way you may want to visualize your data is in a tabular form. Let's look at a couple of ways we can do this. I'm going to add another cell from the low code options, but this time a table. I'm going to select my source, and I'm gonna map over some columns that I would like to display. You can see here the row level detail being displayed. When I add in price, again, this is defaulting to total. Here we have started to aggregate within the table. The formatting could be better here. If I click the three dots and get my display options, I could change that over to currency. So this is a really great way to present additional detail, and viewers of reports can interact with this. They can scroll down and they can sort the columns as well. The other way that you might want to present the data is through a pivot table, and this is within a visual cell. I'm gonna create another cell. I'll do it using this method. The reason I like sometimes building them from other cells is that the source is prepopulated. And I'm going to click on pivot table, And let's look at the same data. So I had product type and product and in values, I will put the total price. Here you can see they're very similar, but with a pivot table, we are grouping together based on the hierarchy. The other thing we are able to do with the pivot table is add columns to split the data by, which allows us to build up a matrix. I'm gonna bring order date into this. It's defaulted to aggregations by year. I think we need more granular details, so let's go for quarter. We can now see the product type and product by quarter, and the values are presented. The final functionality I would like to demonstrate is applicable to all visualizations and tables, and it's towards the bottom of your design pane that you will see the style section. Here, you can make changes to the text formatting within the chart. Using the default option, it's applied it to everything, or I can have more granular control by changing these individually. I can change how grid lines and dividers are presented, and I can change background colors. So for example, we could tweak our rows here. I hope this video has given you the confidence to explore creating simple visuals in count. I'd recommend watching the next video which will take you through some more advanced options and show you how to customize visualizations like these ones here. Thank you.