How to Create a Visual Group in Tableau

Creating visual groups in Tableau is one of the fastest ways to segment your data directly within a chart or map. Instead of digging into menus, you can simply select marks on your screen and cluster them into a new category on the fly. This article will show you exactly how to create and manage these visual groups to make your data exploration faster and more intuitive.

What Exactly is a Visual Group in Tableau?

A visual group lets you select multiple data points (like bars on a chart, dots on a scatter plot, or countries on a map) and combine them into a single, new category. This action is performed directly in your worksheet’s view - you see the data, you select it, and you group it. The classic example is lassoing a few states on a map and grouping them into a new "Mid-Atlantic Sales Region" without writing a single calculation.

When you create a visual group, Tableau automatically generates a new group field in your Data pane. This field essentially contains your newly defined cluster along with all the other original members. It's a powerful way to simplify complex visualizations, test hypotheses, or highlight specific segments for your audience without permanently changing your underlying data structure.

Visual Groups vs. Calculated Field Groups

It’s important to distinguish visual groups from groups made using calculated fields. While both can group dimension members, their use cases are different:

• Visual Groups: Created directly from the visualization by selecting marks. They are ideal for quick, exploratory analysis and simplifying a view on the fly. The process is intuitive and requires zero coding.
• Calculated Fields: Created by writing a formula, typically using IF/ELSE or CASE statements. These are better for creating dynamic or rule-based groups that need to update automatically as your data changes (e.g., grouping sales into "High," "Medium," and "Low" tiers based on a sales threshold). A calculated-field group is much more rigid, but necessary for an auto-scaling data warehouse-based analysis.

For most day-to-day analysis where you want to quickly compare clusters of data, the visual grouping method is far more efficient.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First Visual Group

Let's walk through creating a visual group using Tableau's Sample - Superstore dataset. Our goal is to take a detailed bar chart of sales by Sub-Category and simplify it by grouping the three lowest-performing sub-categories into a single "Other" category.

Step 1: Build Your Initial Visualization

First, you need a visual to work with. A bar chart is perfect for this example.

1. Connect to the Sample - Superstore data source.
2. Drag the Sales measure to the Columns shelf.
3. Drag the Sub-Category dimension to the Rows shelf.
4. Click the Sort button in the toolbar to arrange the bars from highest to lowest sales. You should now have a descending bar chart showing sales for each sub-category.

Step 2: Select the Members to Group

Now, let's select the sub-categories we want to group together. We’ll target the lowest performers. Look at the bottom of your chart for "Labels," "Envelopes," and "Art." Let’s assume those will be your lowest performing in this exercise.

To select them, hold down the Ctrl key (or Cmd key on a Mac) and click on the bar or the label for each of these three sub-categories. You'll see them all become highlighted, indicating they've been selected.

Step 3: Create the Group

With your members selected, it's time to group them. You have a few easy options:

• The Tooltip "Paperclip" Icon: When you hover over your selected marks, a tooltip will appear. At the top of this tooltip, you'll see a small paperclip icon with the word "Group." Click it. Your data is grouped at a lower level of abstraction.
• The Right-Click Menu: Simply right-click on any of the selected marks and choose Group from the context menu.
• The Toolbar Icon: You can also click the paperclip icon located in the main Tableau toolbar.

Once you click "Group," Tableau immediately collapses those three bars into a single bar. In the Data pane on the left, you'll also notice a new field has appeared: Sub-Category (group). Tableau has automatically replaced your original Sub-Category field on the Rows shelf with this new group field.

Step 4: Rename and Alias Your New Group

Tableau automatically names the new group by combining the names of its members, which results in a long, clunky label, something like this: "Labels, Art & a bunch of other stuff...". We can clean this up very easily!

1. Right-click the long cluster group label on your chart's axis.
2. Select "Edit Alias…"
3. In the pop-up that appears, give it a clean and simple name like “Other Office Supplies“ and click OK.

Now your chart is much easier to read, focusing attention on the top performers while neatly tucking away the smaller categories into a single, understandable bar. As with other aliases (e.g., CA, US-West vs OR, US-West vs NV, US-West), these custom segments allow you to more easily explain your data story to others who may not know all of the data that's being combined.

Editing and Managing Your Visual Groups

Once a group is created, it's not set in stone. It is a live query object inside of Tableau. You can easily add members, remove members, or ungroup items.

Modify an Existing Group

To make changes, locate the group field in your Data pane (e.g., Sub-Category (group)), right-click it, and select Edit Group...

This opens a dialog box where you can:

• Drag members from the main list into a group.
• Select a grouped item, then click the ‘ungroup’ button to release individual dimensions.
• Create brand new categories with the "Group" command again.

Using the "Include Other" Functionality

The "Edit Group" dialog box also has a powerful tiny toggle named ‘Include Other’. When you check this box, Tableau combines all single members in the group outside your selected groups into a new parent group named "Other". If you hover over the new "Other" tag, a small button with a '+' appears, allowing you to drill down and focus on specific data points within the combined group. This functionality offers a sleek and professional interaction mode for dashboards.

Practical Use Cases for Visual Grouping

Visual grouping isn't just a neat trick, it's a practical tool for simplifying analysis. Here are a few common scenarios where it shines:

1. High-Performing vs. Low-Performing Segments

Just like our example with sales sub-categories, you can analyze top-performing products versus underperformers. You can select the highest-performing products into a group like "Core Offerings," and the bottom few as "Future Opportunities." You may even color all groups in this scenario independently to further differentiate analysis.

2. Map-Based Regional Grouping

Maps are a hallmark feature of native-Tableau canvas, and visual grouping works beautifully here. If you're mapping sales by state, just grab the lasso selection and group your assigned regional territories. This allows you to analyze individual performance by state and region against the team’s combined numbers.

3. On-the-Fly Customer Segmentation

If you're analyzing a scatter plot of customer sales vs. profitability, and notice a cluster of valuable customers, you can quickly select & label them as 'High Value & Low Costs'. This creates an instant custom view for dashboards, providing live data for real-time customer support.

4. Quick Categorical Corrections

If there's any mislabeled data from a messy CSV upload causing analysis issues, visual grouping can easily correct it. Use the CTRL-click command to combine variations into a singular group to ensure accurate rendering. Problem solved, allowing more focus on analysis.

Final Thoughts

Creating visual groups in Tableau is a simple yet profoundly useful feature that transforms your workbook from a static canvas into an interactive playground for data analysis. It allows you to ask and answer questions fluidly, rearrange data on the fly, and discover patterns by simplifying complex views without burying yourself in formula editors.

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