Ever added a reference line to your Tableau visualization, only to see it appear in the grand total row, even when it doesn’t make sense?

If your grand total uses a different aggregation than your main data (e.g., SUM vs. AVG), the reference line can be misleading. 

Unfortunately, Tableau doesn’t offer a simple way to exclude it—but there’s a trick to removing it while keeping your totals visible.

In the video below, I’ll walk you through the step-by-step solution to remove reference lines from grand totals.

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Dot strip plots help visualize the frequency and distribution of small, discrete data sets. Dots placed in order on a strip are a space-efficient method of laying out ranks across multiple categories.

Cycle plots are a fantastic way to identify seasonality in a data set. And you can make them even more useful by adding indicators for whether they are above or below the average.

Here's how you can do that in Tableau in only 2 minutes.

Like this? You'll love Next-Level Tableau. Learn more at nextleveltableau.com.

In this week's Watch Me Viz, I showed the problem this tip helps solve. An area chart in Tableau only allows a single color. Like this…

What we want is an area chart like this with two colors. 

In 9 simple steps, I’ll show you how to build it. Follow along with the video. The 9 steps are listed at the bottom of this post.

STEPS

1. Create the area chart

2. Show what happens when you add a profit to color - you only get one color

3. Duplicate the measure

4. Fix the axes

    1. Top axis starts at 0

    2. Bottom axis ends at 0

5. Choose a color for each area chart

6. Format the axes to get rid of 0

7. Add reference lines to scale the charts relative to each other

    1. WINDOW_MAX(ABS(SUM([Profit])))

8. Duplicate for the negative reference line

9. Formatting

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

I found this week's data set super interesting, but also super sad in some ways, like people are more and more alone as they age. Or people spending less time with their partners when they are much older, clearly showing when people typically pass away.

This was a relatively simple data set and I was able to build quite a few vizzes during Watch Me Viz. I ended up with something more complex that it needed to be, but it was fun figuring out how to create the calculations.

Here's how it works:

1. Compare the median age at first marriage of each state to the US average for 2006-2010
2. Compare the median age at first marriage of each state to the US average for 2015-2019
3. Check whether the State 
1. Stayed above the US average in both time periods
2. Stayed below the US average in both time periods
3. Moved from below the US average to above the US average
4. Moved from above the US average to below the US average

Cycle plots are exceptionally useful for analyzing seasonality in time series data. In this video, I walk you through two examples that show the limitations of traditional time series analysis and two examples of how cycle plots overcome these problems.  Download the workbook here.

Week 22 was quite the tricky challenge. The idea itself is quite simple, but you had to (1) use REGEX to get the number of bedrooms (thanks to Sylvie Imbert at The Data School for her help!) and (2) know how to create bins without using the BIN function. 

Last week, I was teaching DS23 about mobile design. We reviewed the pros and cons, what to think about from a user and usability perspective, how to make the most important information easy to understand, etc.

In this session I first reviewed the original visualization, then went into data discovery and analysis before finishing with a new visualization.  Watch the video and interaction with the visualization below.

A quadrant chart, by definition, is a scatter plot with a background split into four equal sections. Typically, though, the sections are divided up as to how they compare to the average of both axes. 

A quadrant chart, by definition, is a scatter plot with a background split into four equal sections. Typically, though, the sections are divided up as to how they compare to the average of both axes. 

Wow! What a fun #WatchMeViz that was! I iterated through 16 charts and then when the idea solidified, there was some great conversation and feedback on the chat to help me get to the end. I find survey responses quite difficult to visualize, so instead of getting frustrated, I thought about all of the ways I can compare data to see if anything would work.

Most importantly, thank you to all of your on the live chat. It makes a huge difference to me and I love getting your feedback and questions along the way. You make me better. You can find the final visualization below the video.

A Butterfly Chart is (typically) a bar chart where two sets of data series are displayed side by side. The purpose is to allow you to compare the two data series across a dimension. 

Here is an example of a butterfly chart I created for Makeover Monday.

Notice how I have zero at the center and the scales are the same on either side of zero. This helps show how the chart "leans" to one side or the other.

The comparisons would be more difficult to see if the left and right hand sides of the butterfly did not have the same axis scale. In this video, I show you how two examples for creating a butterfly chart.

In this tip, I show three examples of using Level of Detail expressions to count members of a dimension in a view. I also show how parameters can be used for counting members based on thresholds.

I ended up babbling quite a bit as I created more examples; sorry for that, but I was on a roll.

This was a tough one. For Workout Wednesday week 22, Lorna set out the challenge of reproducing a trellis chart with each pane being a separate Pareto chart or sales vs. number of orders.

Great! That part was pretty straightforward. I've done a Pareto tons of times. I've done a trellis tons of times.

Then there was the coloring of the line. That is, the line needed to be colored in each pane up to the point where two reference lines meet. I got that right way...so I thought.

Lastly, there was the little detail (i.e., not so little) of creating dynamic reference lines that update based on both the parameter selected and the point which you hover over. The fact that these are two conditions should have been my first clue.

I spent quite a while on the reference lines trying to make one reference line act upon two calculations. Well...that's not how reference lines work. Then it hit me that I actually needed four reference lines. Two of them will always hide based on the option selected in the parameter.

PROGRESS!!!!

The calcs were fiddly. I got lost in the logic a couple times because what you have to do is a bit counterintuitive, kind of like double negatives. I wrote down the four scenarios so that I could approach them one by one.

My calculation names are a mess, which drives me insane and actually made getting to the solution much harder. I'm normally very good about making sure I have clear names, but in this case I had several with almost the same name, so I kept mixing them up, hence why writing things down helped.

Once I got that figured out, I was done. A bit of tidying, then I downloaded Lorna's solution to compare mine too. We had taken a nearly identical approach (it must be that teacher she had at The Data School that set her on her way).

Thanks for the challenge Lorna! I enjoyed the struggle and always love the eureka moments. This was another viz that I could easily see used in a business context.

Parameter actions are now out in the wild with Tableau 2019.2. These have me going through A LOT of charts I've made with parameters before, evaluating which ones would benefit from Parameter Actions.

The first chart I wanted to try was a quadrant chart. A quadrant chart colors each quadrant based on thresholds set for each axis in a scatter plot. Previously, I created two parameters and the user had to type in numbers to adjust the view. However, with parameter actions, I can now enable to use to update the quadrants by simply hovering over a dot.

And here's the video...enjoy!

This week's tip builds upon my tip from two weeks ago: How to Convert a Reference Line into a Table Calculation. In this tip, instead of using table calcs, I'll show you how to convert a reference line into a LOD.

Enjoy!