Toan Hoang

Creating Squared Spiral Column Charts in Tableau

Toan Hoang

Two weeks ago, we released our Spiral Column Chart Tutorial in Tableau using the Line Mark Type. In this tutorial, we are going to create a Squared version using the Polygon Mark Type, so I really hope you enjoy 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
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:

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 and Calculated Fields:

Size Parameter

Growth Parameter

Bar Size Parameter

Path (bin)

Index

(INDEX()-1)*[Size]

Index (Bar)

INDEX()-1

TC_Sales

WINDOW_MAX(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Max Sales

WINDOW_MAX(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Percentage

[TC_Sales]/[TC_Max Sales]

TC_Starting Point

10+([Index]/100*[Growth])

X

IF [Index (Bar)] = 0 THEN 
    SIN(RADIANS([Index]))*[TC_Starting Point]
ELSEIF [Index (Bar)] = 1 THEN 
    SIN(RADIANS([Index]))*([TC_Starting Point]+([TC_Percentage]*[Bar Size]))
ELSEIF [Index (Bar)] = 2 THEN 
    SIN(RADIANS([Index]+[Size]))*([TC_Starting Point]+([TC_Percentage]*[Bar Size]))
ELSE
    SIN(RADIANS([Index]+[Size]))*[TC_Starting Point]
END

Y

IF [Index (Bar)] = 0 THEN 
    COS(RADIANS([Index]))*[TC_Starting Point]
ELSEIF [Index (Bar)] = 1 THEN 
    COS(RADIANS([Index]))*([TC_Starting Point]+([TC_Percentage]*[Bar Size]))
ELSEIF [Index (Bar)] = 2 THEN 
    COS(RADIANS([Index]+[Size]))*([TC_Starting Point]+([TC_Percentage]*[Bar Size]))
ELSE
    COS(RADIANS([Index]+[Size]))*[TC_Starting Point]
END

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

Worksheet

We will now build our first worksheet:

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

We will now edit the Table Calculations and build our polygons:

We will repeat this for the Y pill:

Lastly:

You should now see the following:

Now we will adjust the cosmetics:

You should now have the following:

Note: Try adjusting the parameters, and also the TC_Starting Point calculated field

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/SquareSpiralColumnCharts/SquareSpiralColumnChart

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.

Also, do be sure to check out our various courses:

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