Toan Hoang

Creating Square Bump Charts in Tableau

Toan Hoang

A tutorial that was requested by one of my students on Udemy, this is a variation of the bump charts that you may be used to seeing, but also quite different from our Epic Viz style Bump charts. In any case, do have some fun with 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.

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
6

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 Parameter, Bin and Calculated Fields:

Path (bin)

Bar Height Parameter

Index

INDEX()

Date (Month Name)

DATENAME('month', [Order Date])

TC_Sales

WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Rank

RANK_UNIQUE([TC_Sales])

TC_Next Rank

LOOKUP([TC_Rank],1)

X

IF [Index] < 4 THEN
    [Index]
ELSE
    7-[Index]
END

Y

IF [Index] = 1 OR [Index] = 2 THEN
    [TC_Rank]  
ELSEIF [Index] = 3 THEN
    [TC_Next Rank]
ELSEIF [Index] = 4 THEN
    [TC_Next Rank]+[Bar Height]
ELSE
    [TC_Rank]+[Bar Height]
END

The X and Y are the tricky calculations, so to give you a quick idea of what we are doing.

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

Worksheet

We will now build our first worksheet:

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

We will now adjust Table Calculations for the Y Pill:

Through these small adjustments, you should now see the following:

With this said, we will now adjust the cosmetics of our Data Visualization:

we will finally want to 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/SquareBumpCharts/SquareBumpCharts

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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