# How to use Show Me in Tableau!

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2021-01-31
- **Format:** Video · 22 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation
- **Tools:** Tableau (charts, maps, marks card, show me, table calculations)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/how-to-use-show-me-in-tableau
- **Watch:** https://youtu.be/nal52Cdnm0o

I walk through Tableau's Show Me feature, demonstrating how it builds charts automatically and, more importantly, how to read what it does under the hood. I rebuild a table, pie chart, box plot and filled map by hand so you learn to treat Show Me as a coach rather than a crutch.

## Key takeaways

- Show Me can be undocked and floated anywhere on screen, and it only lights up the chart types that are viable for the fields you've selected
- When using Show Me, watch four areas to understand what it's doing: columns, rows, the marks card, and any axis or header
- To replicate a pie chart's percentages you need a quick table calculation (percentage of total) on the label rather than relying on Show Me's default sizing
- Box plots are enabled through the axis reference-line menu, not the marks card, which is easy to miss if you only ever click Show Me
- Dragging a geographical field plus a measure onto colour triggers Tableau's internal mapping database to generate latitude and longitude for a filled map

## Chapters

- 0:33 How Show Me works
- 3:21 Four areas to pay attention to
- 6:06 Building tables and highlight tables
- 8:47 Rebuilding a pie chart by hand
- 14:03 Recreating a box plot
- 18:59 Mapping with the automatic mark type
- 21:23 Closing advice

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/how-to-use-show-me-in-tableau

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena