Toan Hoang

Creating Parallel Sets in Tableau

Toan Hoang

I want to end my second wave of Tableau Tutorials with something a little special. I have to admit that to create the following data visualisation, I had to make several attempts as well as bang my head onto a table a few times, but in the end, here we have it, a Dynamic Parallel Set Data Visualisation in Tableau.

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.

Orders 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
1
4

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:

Calculated Fields

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

@Color Dimension Parameter

Path (bin)

Region + Segment

[Region]+"-"+[Segment]

Segment + Region

[Segment]+"-"+[Region]

Color

IF [@Color Dimension] = "Region" THEN
    [Region]
ELSE
    [Segment]
END

Index

INDEX()

Region Index

INDEX()

Segment Index

INDEX()

TC_Sales

WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales])) / 2

TC_Sales (Left)

IF [X] = 0 THEN
    WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))
ELSE
    0
END / 2

TC_Sales (Right)

IF [X] = 1 THEN
    WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))
ELSE
    0
END / 2

TC_Running Sales (Left)

RUNNING_SUM([TC_Sales (Left)]) - [TC_Sales (Left)]

TC_Running Sales (Right)

RUNNING_SUM([TC_Sales (Right)]) - [TC_Sales (Right)]

X

IF [Index] = 1 OR [Index] = 4 THEN
    0
ELSE
    1
END

Y

IF [X] = 0 THEN
    IF [Index] = 1 THEN
        [TC_Running Sales (Left)]
    ELSEIF [Index] = 4 THEN
        [TC_Running Sales (Left)] + [TC_Sales (Left)]
    END
ELSE
    IF [Index] = 2 THEN
        [TC_Running Sales (Right)]
    ELSEIF [Index] = 3 THEN
        [TC_Running Sales (Right)] + [TC_Sales (Right)]
    END
END

Note: this is actually where the magic happens. We are drawing a polygon based on four points and treating each of the points differently to get our desired effect.

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

Worksheet

We will now build our worksheet:

You should now see the following:

We will now adjust the Y Table Calculation to get our designed effect.

We should end up with the following:

Now, we just need to adjust the cosmetics:

You will now have the centerpiece to our data visualisation:

We will now rapidly create our first additional Worksheets:

We want the following:

We will now rapidly create our second additional Worksheets:

We want the following:

We will now add all through of these worksheets into a dashboard and format to perfection:

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/ParallelSets/ParallelSets

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: https://www.patreon.com/tableaumagic

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