Toan Hoang

Creating Square Arc Charts in Tableau

Toan Hoang

I hope you enjoy this last tutorial before I go on my first break of 2020. This is the technique that I used to create my Premier League Data Visualisation, which you can find here. I hope you enjoy this tutorial, and look forward to writing more for you in May.

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
2
3
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:

Note: we need additional records as we are going to be drawing lines and using a model to add more points on our canvas.

Calculated Fields

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

Year Parameter

Y Adjustment Parameter

Sales Value (Selected)

SUM(IF YEAR([Order Date]) = [Year Parameter] THEN
    [Sales]
END)

Sales Rank (Selected)

RANK_UNIQUE([Sales Value (Selected)])

Sales Value (Previous)

SUM(IF YEAR([Order Date]) = [Year Parameter]-1 THEN
    [Sales]
END)

Sales Rank (Previous)

RANK_UNIQUE([Sales Value (Previous)])

X Adjustment

IF [Sales Rank (Selected)] = [Sales Rank (Previous)] THEN    
    0
ELSE
    [Sales Rank (Selected)]/20
END

X

IF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 1 OR WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 4 THEN
    0
ELSE
    IF [Sales Rank (Selected)] = [Sales Rank (Previous)] THEN
        0
    ELSEIF [Sales Rank (Selected)] > [Sales Rank (Previous)] THEN
        [Sales Rank (Selected)]-[Sales Rank (Previous)]
    ELSE
        -([Sales Rank (Previous)]-[Sales Rank (Selected)])
    END
END

Y

IF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 1 OR WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 2 THEN
    [Sales Rank (Previous)]
ELSE
    [Sales Rank (Selected)]
END

Zero

0

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

Worksheet

We will now build our worksheet:

If all goes well, you should now see the following:

We will adjust the Color and Size of our Data Visualisation:

You should now see the following:

Now, this looks pretty good, but we want to make some minor adjustments to the X and Y values; this step is completely optional:

Change the X Calculated Field to:

IF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 1 OR WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 4 THEN
    0
ELSE
    IF [Sales Rank (Selected)] = [Sales Rank (Previous)] THEN
        0
    ELSEIF [Sales Rank (Selected)] > [Sales Rank (Previous)] THEN
        [Sales Rank (Selected)]-[Sales Rank (Previous)]+[X Adjustment]
    ELSE
        -([Sales Rank (Previous)]-[Sales Rank (Selected)])-[X Adjustment]
    END
END

We added the plus or minus X Adjustment

Change the Y Calculated Field to:

IF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 1 OR WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Path])) = 2 THEN
    [Sales Rank (Previous)]
    +IIF([Sales Rank (Selected)]=[Sales Rank (Previous)], 0,[Y Adjustment])
ELSE
    [Sales Rank (Selected)]
    -IIF([Sales Rank (Selected)]=[Sales Rank (Previous)], 0,[Y Adjustment])
END

We added a calculation to include the Y Adjustment parameter.

We should finally have the following:

And that is pretty much it from a functionality point of view, however, we will now adjust our cosmetics:

You should now have the final data visualisation:

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/SquareArcChart/SquareArcCharts

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.

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