Summary number and Summary change visualizations

Hey, everybody, this is Doug. In this video, I want to talk about the summary change and summary number visualizations in Analysis workspace. Now like some of the other visualizations, the summary change and summary number visualizations require data from a freeform table. So I’ve got a freeform table here. We’ve got visitors and revenue and I named it that because that’s exactly what we have. Unique visitor numbers and revenue numbers and we’ve got the last 30 days here. And so sometimes it helps to just have a big, giant number staring you in the face instead of having to kind of wade through some of your table data. And so that’s what these summary visualizations are all about. So let’s start off by grabbing a summary number visualization. We’re going to drag it in right above this. And the first thing we’ll do is we will verify that it’s pointing at the right table. So visitors and revenue, yep, we’re good there. So you can see here that it is taking a revenue number. I don’t even know where that is, I don’t see it. Oh, there it is down here. It’s this week’s revenue number. But what I really want is on this first one the total number of unique visitors for the last 30 days. So I’m going to grab this number right here, so I’m just going to click there and it changes automatically right up here. In fact, if we click around, that number is going to change and we don’t really want that to happen. We want it to stay with this number. So after we click on that, we’ll go up to this dot right here and we will lock that in, lock selection. Okay, now when I click around, it’s not going to change. It’s going to stay on that number. Now you can size these. You can make it shorter, skinnier, smaller, whatever. I’m going to leave it because I don’t need to show you how to do that. But I am going to add one more for my total revenue. So I’m going to grab another visualization which is a summary number and drag it in here next to the other one. And that’s taken that last number that I clicked on, so what I really want is this number. So now I see my revenue up there. Well, that’s a little unwieldy. I don’t really need it all the way down to the dollar and so I’m going to change that a little bit after I lock it in. Let’s lock it in first. Lock that in so it stays on that. And then I’m going to go up to this gear and I’m going to abbreviate the value. Now if I leave zero here, then it’s just going to say 19 million. Well, maybe that’s not quite specific enough, so I’m going to go back in and maybe add one decimal.

I like that, 19.3, that’s pretty good. Gives me a good idea of the revenue and it’s not a giant, long number. Of course, like most visualizations, we recommend that you do put a good title on it. So maybe I’m going to put last 30 days visitors. We’ll put over here last 30 days revenue. Okay, and so now we have good titles on those as well. So as the date rolls and I keep on getting the last 30 days day by day as that changes, my number here will change. So obviously you can change the calendar to represent whatever days you want, whatever time period you want, et cetera, and you can choose the numbers in the freeform table to give you exactly what you need, okay, good enough. Now let’s go back to the visualizations and let’s add a summary change. I’m going to grab that. Put it up here next to the other ones. Now right away we’re going to get this error. It’s not really an error. It’s just kind of a message that says it can’t really render this visualization unless you give it the info it needs, and what it needs is two numbers. Now right now you can see that I’m actually sorting by revenue and so my weeks are not in order here. You can see that I have the week of June 27th, and then July 4th, and then back to June 20th, and then July 11th. Anyway so what I really need to do is sort by the week and we’ll just kind of click on this, and now I have the most recent at the bottom. Or I can click on it again and show the most recent at the top. Doesn’t really matter, right? So as long as I have the numbers where I need them, these ones didn’t change of course because the totals are the same. But what did change of course is the order of these and so now if I want to compare two weeks ago revenue to one week ago revenue or last week’s revenue to this week’s revenue, I can go to these and I can select two of them. Now this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to select last week’s revenue and then hold it down and select of this week’s revenue. Now it’s important that you do it in the order that you want it to compare. So compared to last week, what was this week? If I would have dragged it the other way, then it would have kind of been going back in time. Doesn’t really make sense for telling us the direction of our revenue. Now you can see that we’re down 28% which might be alarming. So you can see here that this week we only have 3.2 million. Last week was 4.5. However it doesn’t really show us the whole truth 'cause if I go to last 30 days, you can see that right now as I’m recording this it’s Thursday. And so we’re comparing a whole week last week to only a partial week this week and maybe Friday and Saturday are our best days, who knows. So what I really want to do at this point when I’m going to compare weeks, really want two full weeks to compare. So I’m going to go to my calendar here and I’m going to go to say the last four full weeks. So it’s not going to count this week until it’s complete. So it is last week and then the other three weeks before that, and I’m going to apply that. And now even though I am down 0.3%, it’s a fair comparison because I have the most recent full two weeks that I am comparing. So I’m comparing the week of June 27th which was 4.54 to the week of July 4th, which was 4.53, just a little bit less. Again, that’s a fair comparison. And as it gets to the end of this week, then of course it will show that week compared to the week before and it’ll just keep rolling like that. And so that gives us a better comparison when you’re doing a summary change. Now I can actually name this and maybe we just want to call it something like revenue direction or something like that. And then maybe we can put in something that says what it really is in the notes and how it’s using the last full week compared to the week before that. Now if I am going to leave it like this, I might want to change the titles of these ones up here because they’re not really the last 30 days anymore. But in any case, you get the idea and hopefully that makes sense. Now we can take one of these, I’m going to grab this. I am going to lock the selection here. And now when I lock this selection, it is important that I do select the selected positions because again I do want those most recent two full weeks as opposed to selected items. I don’t want to follow this down as those weeks go by and fall off of my table, and then it’s zero. I want the latest two weeks. And so you lock that, you choose selected positions, and I can even make my data source go away because maybe I don’t need the table anymore, so I get rid of that. And now I just have my summary numbers and my summary change up here and maybe that’s all I need in order to give the people who are going to look at this project the information that they need. I hope that was helpful and that you enjoy these two visualizations. Have a great day. -