I am really having a fun moment with Dendrogram Charts, and in this tutorial, we are going to combine a Dendrogram Chart with Rounded Bar Charts to create a very nice looking effect. I hope you enjoy this tutorial and I cannot wait to see what you build using this.

Note: This is an alternative type of data visualisation, and sometimes pushed for by clients. Please always look at best practices for data visualisations before deploying this into production.

Data

We will start by loading the Sample Superstore data into Tableau Desktop / Tableau Public.

Order Data Source

Note: If you have Tableau Desktop, you can use the Sample data source, but if you are using Tableau Public, download and load the following data source.

Once your data is loaded into Tableau, right-click on the data source and click on Edit Data Source… with the Data Source Editor open, paste the following:

Path
0
200

Note: If you are using Tableau 2020.2 or great i.e. have access to new Relationship Model, you will need to double-click on the originally pasted data source to open up before pasting in the Path Data.

You should get an error as there is no joining column, however, click on Add new join clause, go to Create Join Calculation, type 1 and click OK. Do this for the right-hand side as well. Ensure that you have Inner join selected and you should see the following:

Note: we need additional records as we are going to be drawing lines and using densification to get more points on our canvas. For more information, check out our article on Data Densification.

Calculated Fields

With our data set loaded into Tableau, we are going to create the following Bin and Calculated Fields:

Path (bin)

  • Right-click on Path, go to Create and select Bins…
  • In the Edit Bins dialogue window:
    • Set New field name to Path (bin)
    • Set Size of bins to 1
    • Click Ok

TC_Sales

WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Total Sales

WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Percentage

[TC_Sales]/[TC_Total Sales]

TC_Percentage (Adjusted)

[TC_Percentage]/WINDOW_MAX([TC_Percentage])

TC_Rank

RANK_UNIQUE([TC_Sales],"desc")

X

((INDEX()-1)*0.12)-6

TC_Sigmoid

1/(1+EXP(-[X]))

Y

[TC_Sigmoid]*([TC_Rank]-(WINDOW_MAX([TC_Rank])+1)/2)/100

TC_Size

IF [X] >=6 AND [X] <= 6+(10*[TC_Percentage (Adjusted)]) THEN 
    1
ELSE
    0
END

With this done, let us start creating our data visualisation.

Worksheet

We will now build our first worksheet:

  • Change the Mark Type to Line
  • Drag Sub-Category onto the Color Mark
  • Drag Path (bin) onto the Columns Shelf
    • Right-click on this pill and ensure that Show Missing Values is selected
    • Drag this object onto the Detail Mark
  • Drag X onto the Columns Shelf
    • Right-click on this pill, go to Compute Using and select Path (bin)
  • Drag Y onto the Rows Shelf
    • Right-click on this pill, go to Compute Using and select Path (bin)

You should now see the following:

We will now adjust the Y pill Table Calculation:

  • Right-click on the Y pill and select Edit Table Calculation:
    • In Nested Calculation select Y
      • In Compute Using select Specific Dimensions
      • Select only Sub-Category
    • In Nested Calculations select TC_Rank
      • In Compute Using select Specific Dimensions
      • Select only Sub-Category

You should see the following:

We have now built the Dendrogram, so will now work on creating the Rounded Bar Chart:

  • Drag TC_Size onto the Size Mark
    • Right-click on this pill, go to Compute Using and select Path (bin)
  • Right-click on the TC_Size pill on the Size Mark and go to Edit Table Calculation:
    • In Nested Calculations select TC_Total Sales
      • In Compute Using select Specific Dimensions
      • Ensure that Sub-Category and Path (bin) are both selected, and Sub-Category is on top
    • In Nested Calculations select TC_Percentage (Adjusted)
      • In Compute Using select Specific Dimensions
      • Ensure that Sub-Category and Path (bin) are both selected, and Sub-Category is on top

You should now see the following:

We will now make our final adjustments:

  • Hide the X-Axis and Y-Axis Headers
  • Hide the Grid Lines
  • Hide the Zero Lines
  • Add a Label to the End of the Line
  • Disable the Tooltips
  • Adjust the Size

We will now finally have the following:

and boom, we are done! I hope you enjoyed creating this data visualization and learned some cool techniques as well. As always, you can find this data visualisation on Tableau Public at https://public.tableau.com/profile/toan.hoang#!/vizhome/DendrogramwithRoundedBarCharts/DendrogramwithRoundedBarCharts

Summary

I hope you all enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it and as always do share the love. Do let me know if you experienced any issues recreating this Visualization, and as always, please leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @Tableau_Magic. Do also remember to tag me in your work if you use this tutorial.

If you like our work, do consider supporting us on Patreon, and for supporting us, we will give you early access to tutorials, exclusive videos, as well as access to current and future courses on Udemy:

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29 COMMENTS

  2. Good evening,
    after inserting the path 0 200 from the clipboard and creating the left join (p.s. you wrote inner join, but screenshot says left join) and saving the file, straight after that my entire source is lost. Can you imagine why? I have Desktop and used your orders.csv.
    Text file properties?

    J.A.

  4. Re last comment this doesnt make any sense sorry. Also i’m having the same issue as Robert with my order being upside down and cant see anyway to change it

  5. Hello Toan – How would I remove the lines coming after round bar chart ? I just want it to appear number directly after round shape bar chart,not the line and then numbers ?

  6. Hi Toan, Great tutorial but I wanted to ask how do create this for several measures instead of a dimension (for your case by sub-category)?

  7. Hi Toan, thank you for this idea. I have created this and it works perfectly with my data. However I have 3 level of hierarchy which I want to kind link so that one click can do the job. Please could you let me know if that’s possible. I have seen you two level of dendrogram on your page but appreciate if we can do this with this sample store. In any case I would greatly appreciate your thoughts and suggestion.

  9. Thank you so much sir,I am a civil engineering student but I have keen interest in data analytics.That is why I started learning tableau and searching how to create dendrograph in tableau and find your post .I must you explain very well and I able to design the graph in tableau.Sir also suggest me how can I start my career as business analyst as my core field is civil engineering.

  10. Should the bars represent the volume size? For example, longer bar represents the larger volume? When I reverse the axis, I show the largest amount on top with the shortest bar. How can I fix it so I have the longest bar with the largest volume?

  11. I am not able to line up the labels. I went through the comment section and followed some steps but I still cannot line them at the end of the line. Any tips??

  12. What is the best way of making this work when you already have a percentage calculated? Or if you have a layout like below:

    Category Count Total Count
    A 1 10
    B 6 12
    C 2 8

    Hopefully that lines up well enough!

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