Toan Hoang

Creating Tilted Bar Charts in Tableau

Toan Hoang

I saw this data visualisation by Alex Jones on Data Visualisation Trump’s Executive Time and the visual effect stuck with me. So, I eventually got around to writing this tutorial on created Tilted Bar Charts 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:

Path (bin)

@Bar Height Parameter

@Degrees Parameter

@Top X Parameter

@Dimension Parameter

Index (Path)

INDEX()

Index (Dimension)

INDEX()

Dimension

IF [@Dimension] = "Category" THEN
    [Category]
ELSEIF [@Dimension] = "Sub-Category" THEN
    [Sub-Category]
ELSEIF [@Dimension] = "State" THEN
    [State]
ELSEIF [@Dimension] = "Region" THEN
    [Region]
END

TC_Sales

WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Max Sales

WINDOW_MAX(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Sales (Adjusted)

[TC_Sales]/[TC_Max Sales]

Y-Adjustment (Tilt Value)

TAN(RADIANS([@Degrees]))*[TC_Sales (Adjusted)]

X

IF [Index (Path)] = 1 OR [Index (Path)] = 4 THEN
    0
ELSE
    [TC_Sales (Adjusted)]
END

Y

IF [Index (Path)] = 1 THEN
    0 + [Index (Dimension)]
ELSEIF [Index (Path)] = 2 THEN
    0 + [Index (Dimension)] - [Y-Adjustment (Tilt Value)]
ELSEIF [Index (Path)] = 3 THEN
    [@Bar Height] + [Index (Dimension)] - [Y-Adjustment (Tilt Value)]
ELSEIF [Index (Path)] = 4 THEN
    [@Bar Height] + [Index (Dimension)] 
END

Label Position

INDEX()+([@Bar Height]/2)

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

Worksheet

We will now build our worksheet:

You should have the following:

We will now adjust the Table Calculations:

You should now see the following:

We will adjust the cosmetics of our Data Visualisation:

Finally we will add our Labels:

You will finally see the following:

Now, we need to add the final cosmetic touches:

You are looking to have the following final data visualisation:

You can adjust the @Degree parameter to have fun with your 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/TiltedBarCharts/TiltedBarCharts

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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