Labeling a rounded bar has always been tricky. You might manually drag the labels, try to play around with the alignment and more, but still, you can't get the labels perfect.

No more! In this Tableau Tip, I'll show you:

1. Why standard labels don't work

2. How to build a rounded bar chart

3. How to perfectly align the labels

Have you ever heard of the "sunken cost fallacy"? If you haven't, it is where you continue a task based on previously invested resources, such as time, despite new evidence suggesting that the cost, beginning immediately, outweighs the expected benefit.

I really liked the original visualization by YouGovAmerica this week, so during Watch Me Viz, I spent the hour working to replicate it. 

We were extremely fortunate to have Ann Jackson join us on the weekly Wise Up Wednesday at The Data School. Originally she was going to take us through how she completed week 45. However, I thought it would be interesting for Ann to see how we approach the challenges. Ann pitched in a couple times with some hints to keep us from heading down the wrong path. We were able to build the chart in one sheet, including the headers whereas Ann used a text box for the headers.

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Despite the massive setback to women's right in Texas, less Americans are anti-abortion than in 1975. Now maybe if the barbaric dinosaurs in Congress in Texas came into the 21st century, they'd finally realize women are our equals and we shouldn't control them. It's all very, very disgusting. They should be ashamed, but of course they're not. In fact, they are quite proud of what they "achieved".

For #MakeoverMonday week 45, we were analyzing the software and hardware units sold across several regions, as defined by Nintendo itself. The data was pretty simple. I started by doing some basic data prep to simplify the names of the fields and to pivot the data to make it easier to compare the years.

In this video, I will first review the initial visualization and talk about what works and what does. I then iterate through several methods for visualizing the data, hoping to find one that works well with this data set. With feedback from the viewers, I was able to create a bar chart that compares the percentage of global units sold of software vs. hardware for Nintendo.

I showed several methods for visualizing the data:

1. Line charts (several versions)
2. Stacked bar chart
3. Side-by-Side Bar
4. Tables
5. Scatter plot
6. Connected scatterplot

Resources:

1. Data Set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w45-dedicated-video-game-sales-units
2. Final visualization - https://bit.ly/MM2020W45
3. Tableau Color Palette Generator - https://color.tableaumagic.com/
4. Colors from Image Tool - https://html-color-codes.info/colors-from-image/
5. ASCII character reference - https://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/27F0-27FF

It's not an uncommon scenario. You want to make your bar chart look a bit nicer (or different). You want to hide the dimension header, but you don't want the labels inside the bars. How about adding the dimension labels above the bars? In this tip, I show you how to do just that. 

As this week is election week in the United States, I thought it would be fun to give everyone a data set about population projections by race, sex, origin, age and year. It's a fascinating data set to explore.

The original visualization is from the US Census Bureau:

What works well?

What could be improved?

What I did

What a super useful workout this week from Ann Jackson! Get all of the requirements here. The idea was to build a dashboard that allows the user to highlight the top and bottom panes based on a set of options. There are so many use cases for this in a business setting.

The Easy Parts

The Biggest Challenge

This week, Rody had a few tricks up his sleeve for Workout Wednesday. At first, I thought we were going to need to do something with polygons like he did in this tip about shading between two lines. I started down that road, but quickly realized I'd used up all of the shelves and I needed more, so back to the drawing board I went.

Suddenly a possible solution popped into my head (I figured it out by hovering again and again over his viz). I'm not going to give away any spoilers. Here's my solution if you get stuck...but give it a solid effort before you look at someone else's solution.

Good luck!

This week's challenge started with a Convo challenge at The Information Lab from Chris Love. In Chris' challenge, he created a scatterplot that allows the user to click on a State and drill down to the City level. That is the starting point for this week's challenge and I've taken it to another level.

As a hint, in Chris' version, all cities were in the initial view, but for each State, all of the cities in that State would display the same value until you click on the State. The drawback of this method is that displaying mark labels (i.e., State names) only looks decent when a State only has sales in a single city. I want to show the labels for all States that have enough space to display it. In other words, the initial view should show only one dot per State, then when you drill down, you will see one dot per City in the selected State.

Before you start, I would highly encourage you to interact with the viz below to see how the drill down works.

Using this data source, here are the requirements:

1. Create a scatterplot of sales vs. profit.
2. In the initial view, you should see only one dot for each State. If you do this part right, you will have 48 marks in the view.
3. Label the dots for the States in the initial view where the labels fit (using Tableau's automatic labelling).
4. If you click on one of the States, then the view should automagically drill down to the cities for the selected State.
5. If you choose more than one State, then the drill down should be disabled.
6. Once you are in the City view, you should see one dot for each city. For example, if you click on Washington, then the City view should have 40 marks (one for each City).
7. At the City level, the user should be able to click on the white space in the chart to go back to the State level.
8. At the City level, no cities should be highlighted.
9. You must match the tooltips. They show the State, Sales and Profit when each dot is a State. The tooltip shows the City, Sales and Profit when each dot is a City.
10. The title and subtitle should change depending on if the view is State level or City level.
11. Each dot should be colored by profit ratio for the State or City.
12. The view should be 600x650.

Be sure to tweet an image of your work and a Tableau Public link and tag @EmmaWhyte and @VizWizBI. Good luck! I guarantee you'll learn a lot this week.

Inspiration for this week's Workout Wednesday comes from this great post by Curtis Harris. Of course with this being Workout Wednesday, I've added a few twists. In all, this took me about 45 min.


First, you can find the housing index data here. You will need to do some minor data prep. Curtis has some hints in his post if you get stuck.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. The data is displayed as the monthly percent change in the house price index based on the date chosen above the chart.
2. The State selected must be highlighted in the greenish color (#3B6F84).
3. The US average must be highlighted in black.
4. The most recent value should be shown on the end of the selected State and the US average.
5. All States must be in the view. All States that are NOT selected should be thin and grey.
6. Include a reference line for the month selected and include a dot at that point.
7. Match all of my titles and formatting. Note that the chart title is dynamic.
8. Match my axes.
9. Match the footer (except replace my name with yours).
10. Be sure to tag Curtis (@Harris7Curtis) so he gets credit when you publish it to Twitter.

Emma confirmed shortly after she posted this week's challenge that she was up to some sneaky tricks with the formatting of the numbers in the challenge. Let me recap the requirements:

• Dashboard is 800*1000 pixels
• Re-create Emma's dashboard as close as you can get it
• Use a separate sheet for each of the red and white wine heatmaps and scores
• The scores should be formatted so when it is a whole number no decimal places are shown. 
• When the score has a half point, it should be shown to 1 decimal place.
• Highlighting the Taster in the reds or whites also highlights them in the other chart

I made both of them discrete dimensions and assigned the colors using the color picker to choose the colors from Emma's viz. I then duplicated both of them and assigned alias names to use for the color legend of each chart.


For the score formatting, all I did was create a simple calculation that first summarizes the score, then changes it to a string, then determines if it has a decimal and if so, return it rounded to one decimal and converted to a string, otherwise return it rounded to zero decimals and convert it to a string.

I'm going to have to download Emma's version to see how she did it. We tend to take very different approaches. With that, here's my Workout Wednesday Week 22. Click on the image for the interactive version.

This week's tip came from a question reader Jonathan Hayter sent me.

I want to show one decimal point on the value of my mark labels -- except when the digit following the decimal point is zero. So, in the example below, I'd like to make the label for 2013 show as "57%" rather than "57.0%."

Great question! I told Jonathan that I disagree with formatting the numbers differently, but I also wanted to help him find a solution. The answer is two calculations and the modulo function.

In the final version you see below I've included a third calculation to highlight the bars that a zero following the decimal point. This is merely to make it easier for you to see. I didn't show this in the video. Download the workbook to see the solution.

Enjoy!

I've written about this week's tip before, yet never created a video for it. People have been telling me they find the videos useful, so occasionally I'm going back and creating videos for older tips. This is one of those weeks.

In this week's video, I show you how to use a single parameter with unlimited number formats. This is particularly useful when you have a single chart with a single measure and you want you user to be able to swap out the measure, yet retain the number formatting for the measure (e.g., currency vs. percentages).

This week's video is an extension of the great blog post by Kevin Taylor on the Tableau blog about how to create full year heatmap calendars. This video shows you how to add month labels to the visualisation.

Last week, Kevin Taylor of Tableau wrote a great blog post on the use cases and the how to for heatmap calendars. Kevin ends the blog post with this question/challenge:

I’ve still yet to come across a really good, scalable solution for adding in the month names.

Kevin sent this to me several weeks ago and I came up with this solution, which is your challenge for this week. Create a heatmap calendar that includes month names. Download the data for this challenge here. You must match everything: the titles, the colors, the fonts, the filter, all of it. The final dashboard size is 600x800.

TIP: You could start by downloading Kevin's workbook. This will give you the LOD that he used for the weeks. Good luck!