This week’s tip is quite a bit longer than normal, but that’s because I had several things I wanted to cover. Essentially, I wanted to show you how I built this viz for Dear Data Two.

The video covers:

1. How to add a background image
2. How to create donut charts with an image in the middle
3. How to use point annotations to find the precise locations for placing objects

I hope you enjoy the tips; it was a lot of fun making this viz. Click here to see my write up for the Dear Data Two project.

Hashu Shenkar from the Data School was rehearsing his Alteryx/Tableau demo this morning and showed us a simple map like this:



One of the problems with maps like this is that the sorting defaults to the data source order, which is this case is the zip code.

What I want the map to do is bring the highest and lowest values to the front. When I look at the sort options on the zip code dimension, I can choose Profit in descending order.


Choosing that only bring the positive values for profit to the front.


To get the positive and negative outliers to the front, I need to create a simple calculated field on Profit that returns the absolute value.


Then in the sort for zip code, choose this measure.


And now you can clearly see the outliers for your map.


If you really want to see the outliers to pop, make one small adjustment to the colour scale. Change it to a palette that has white in the middle of the range.


Download the workbook used to create from Tableau Public here.

Last week, for Dear Data Two Week 12, I included a trick for aligning custom shapes. This week's tip is a demo of how that trick works and how you can do it yourself.

Last week at the Tableau conference in London, I had the pleasure of sitting on a Zen Master panel with Craig Bloodworth and Matt Francis. This was a really fun session in that the audience threw some questions at us and they also picked random tips and tricks from a hat they were passing around. We had to demo these tips/tricks as fast as we could.

I showed them again on Friday during the Data School weekly presentations, but apparently there were actually some people that didn’t watch. So I recorded them again this morning for this week’s blog post. Enjoy!

The Data School launched this week and on the consultants' second day, we brought them into an all day training class with the rest of the Information Lab team. One of the courses we taught was advanced visualisations. The reason we run these internal training classes is because we have a core belief in continuous learning.

As part of this exercise, we were building a dot plot and Laszlo Zsom asked how to connect two dots on the same row.  I hadn't ever done it before, so I used a Gantt chart to connect them. Then Chris Love suggested using lines.

In this week's tip (two days late as it is), I demonstrate both of these methods.  Click on the image below to enjoy the video.

A very common question and feature request I see on the Tableau Forums is to show the axis above a chart rather than below, as Tableau does by default.



When I was working on solving this, I started by looking at the XML for a workbook and there is a bit of code that controls whether an axis displays. I built a dual-axis chart to see if I could change the display in the code.

In the <style> section, note the value=‘false’ setting. This is what is hiding the axis. I changed only the top axis by setting it to ‘true', but when I opened the workbook again, both axes were displayed. Back to the drawing board I went.
Here are the steps to follow to display the axis above the bar chart and not below (sort of):
Step 1: Create a bar chart.

Step 2: Duplicate the measure that is shown in the chart by right-clicking on the measure in the Measures list and choosing Duplicate.

Step 3: Drag the duplicated measure onto the secondary axis.

You should now have a chart that looks like this:

Step 4: Change the mark type for both measures to Bar.

Step 5: Remove the Measure Names field from the Color shelf. This isn’t required, but you really don’t need to have two colors for the same measure.

Step 6: Right-click on the bottom axis and choose Format. Change the Font to white and set the Ticks to ‘None’. This doesn’t hide the axis (hence the reason I said ’sort of’ above), but it will give the appearance that the axis isn’t there.

Note: The reason that you have to duplicate the measure has to do with how formatting works. If I used the same measure again for the secondary axis (i.e., Sales in this case), then when I format Sales, it applies to both axes. However, when you duplicate the field, Tableau treats it like a totally separate measure with its own formatting.

Step 7: Double click on each of the axes and remove the titles. This isn’t required, but it makes the axis narrower.

That’s it! While this isn’t a perfect solution, it works. Also, be sure to clean up the tooltips since they will show the measure twice.
You can download the workbook used to create this viz here.

I've missed the last few weeks of #TableauTipTuesday, and technically it's Wednesday in London, but pretend I'm in California and it's Tuesday. This week, I show you how to create waterfall charts in Tableau.

The first example is very basic; I did this intentionally so that the steps would be super easy to follow. The second example is only moderately more complex; it looks at Tableau's SEC financial filings from 2011-2014.

I've written previously about adding totals on the top of stacked bars. In that example, I used a secondary axis to add the totals. However, what if you're already using the secondary axis? As an example, consider this view:


To display the total for each year on top of the stacked bars, follow these steps.

Step 1: Change the mark type for the left axis to Gantt.


Step 2: Right-click on the Sales pill and add a Running Total Quick Table Calculation
Step 3: Change the Compute Using to Department. The view should now look like this:


Step 4: Create a calculated field that returns the negative Sales.


Step 5: Add this new calculated field to the Size shelf for the Sales axis.


The viz should now look like a stacked bar chart.


Step 6: Create a calculated field to return the running total of sales, but only return it for the top bar.


Step 7: Drag this new calculated field onto the Label shelf for the Sales axis.
Step 8: Change the Compute Using to Department.

That's it!  The view will now look like a stacked bar chart with the total of each year on the top.


Download the Tableau workbook here.

As a follow up to yesterday's blog post about "One Metric; Two Number Formats", Tableau Zen Master Joe Mako left a suggestion that I'm going to write about today that utilizes the Labels shelf. This method allows you to have as many different number formats as you desire, whereas my previous post only allowed two (and frankly, its use case it pretty limited).

Step 1: Create a parameter that is a list of metrics.


Step 2: Create a calculated field that returns the value of the metric selected.

Here's the scenario:

On his great Evolytics blog, Ryan Sleeper, former Iron Viz Champ and renowned design guru, wrote about how to create donut charts in Tableau. His technique is sound. The concern I have is that he recommends using floating objects on a dashboard to create the hole in the donut.

If you have any experience with floating objects in Tableau, you know the pain of taking lots of time to make a dashboard look perfect in Desktop with floating objects, only to have it get all messed up once you publish it to Server or Public. I rarely recommend using floating objects for just this reason; it's frustrating and can make your work look sloppy.  Hopefully Tableau soon fixes this bug that has been around as long as floating objects have existed.

Another reason to avoid floating objects is that there are more objects that have to be drawn on the dashboard, which can potentially have a performance impact.

While I typically hate pie charts, I think that donut charts, used in this specific way, can indeed be effective. As Ryan says in his post:

When used for the specific purpose of showing a metric’s progress to goal, with one “slice” being the current state of the KPI and one “slice” being the remainder to goal, I think a donut chart works well.

Here's how I would create a donut chart in Tableau using a single worksheet. The final product looks like this:

I don't use background images often in Tableau. In fact, I never knew how to REALLY use them until I went to Tableau Trainer Certification with Molly Monsey, trainer extraordinaire at Tableau. With Molly's permission, I am sharing with you the super simple way that she showed us how to add labels to background images in Tableau.

First, here is the video and farther down the page are summarized steps with screenshots.


Step 1: Open the background image in a tool like Snagit to get the dimensions. Write the dimensions down.


Step 2: Create a data source. In this example, I created the outline of the data source in Excel and left the X/Y coordinates blank.


Step 3: Connect to the data source created in step 2 in Tableau.

Step 4: Change the data type for the X & Y fields to Numbers and move them to the measures area.

Step 5: Add the X field to the Columns shelf and the Y field to the Rows shelf.


Step 6: Add the background image by going to Map => Background Image => [Sheet Name]. Choose the image and enter the dimensions that you wrote down in step 1 in the Right and Top boxes respectively.


Step 7 (optional): Fix the axes to the size of the image.



Step 8: Hide the axis headers.

Step 9: Drag the Name field to the Label shelf.

Step 10: Annotate a point with the X/Y coordinates.


Note how this looks after you hit OK.  You can now move the end of the arrow around to get the coordinates of any point in the image.


Step 11: Move the end of the arrow around to each place in the image that you want to place a label and enter those X/Y values into the Excel spreadsheet. Save the Excel spreadsheet.


Step 12: Refresh the data source in Tableau and the labels will magically appear above the heads of each person.


Step 13: Remove the annotation.

Step 14: Change the Mark Type to Text and format the text as you see fit.  That's it!


You can download the Excel file here and the Tableau workbook here.