Toan Hoang

Dot Quadrant Chart in Tableau

Toan Hoang

I regularly look through websites for design, Pinterest, and other resources for ideas and regularly post to my Facebook Group. After posting one image, I received several messages about creating this in Tableau, so I decided to have a drink and look into this, I hope you enjoy this tutorial.

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 into production.

Data

Load the following data into Tableau Desktop / Public. 

Metric,Path,Percentage
Metric 1,1,0.8
Metric 1,100,0.8
Metric 2,1,0.9
Metric 2,100,0.9
Metric 3,1,0.4
Metric 3,100,0.4
Metric 4,1,0.7
Metric 4,100,0.7

Note: we need two records for each Metric 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 Calculated Fields and Bins:

Create Path (bin)

Index

INDEX()

TC_Percentage

WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Percentage]))

Rows

IF [Index] = 1 THEN
    1
ELSEIF [Index] <= 4 THEN
    2
ELSEIF [Index] <= 9 THEN
    3
ELSEIF [Index] <= 16 THEN
    4
ELSEIF [Index] <= 25 THEN
    5
ELSEIF [Index] <= 36 THEN
    6
ELSEIF [Index] <= 49 THEN
    7
ELSEIF [Index] <= 64 THEN
    8
ELSEIF [Index] <= 81 THEN
    9
ELSE
    10
END

Columns

IF [Rows] = 1 THEN
    0
ELSEIF [Rows] = 2 THEN
    [Index] - 3
ELSEIF [Rows] = 3 THEN
    [Index] - 7
ELSEIF [Rows] = 4 THEN
    [Index] - 13
ELSEIF [Rows] = 5 THEN
    [Index] - 21
ELSEIF [Rows] = 6 THEN
    [Index] - 31
ELSEIF [Rows] = 7 THEN
    [Index] - 43
ELSEIF [Rows] = 8 THEN
    [Index] - 57
ELSEIF [Rows] = 9 THEN
    [Index] - 73
ELSEIF [Rows] = 10 THEN
    [Index] - 91
END

Note: We are using Rows and Columns calculated fields to create our dot triangle.

Color

IF [Index] / WINDOW_MAX([Index]) < [TC_Percentage] THEN
    WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Metric]))
ELSE
    "Grey"
END

X

IF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Metric])) = "Metric 1" THEN
    [Columns]
ELSEIF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Metric])) = "Metric 2" THEN
    [Rows]
ELSEIF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Metric])) = "Metric 3" THEN
    [Columns]
ELSE
    -[Rows]
END

Y

IF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Metric])) = "Metric 1" THEN
    [Rows]
ELSEIF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Metric])) = "Metric 2" THEN
    [Columns]
ELSEIF WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Metric])) = "Metric 3" THEN
    -[Rows]
ELSE
    -[Columns]
END

So now that we have created a lot of Calculated fields, we will now put this together into a Worksheet.

Worksheet

We will now build our first worksheet:

If all goes well you should see something like the following:

Now that we have the basics, we will want to roate the Metrics around, and this is where our X and Y objects come in.

You should see the following:

As you can see, we are almost there. At this point, go and have a look at the X and Y objects to see what we have done to rotate the dot matrix.

Now we will finish off the basic shape by dragging the Metric object from the Columns Shelf to the Detail Mark. We should now have the following:

Now we will adjust the cosmetics to complete this data visualisation:

You will want to have the following:

and boom we are done, I did not expect to be able to complete this tutorial as quickly as I did, but you can find my version of this visualisation on Tableau Public at
https://public.tableau.com/profile/toan.hoang#!/vizhome/DotQuadrantChart/DotQuadrantChart

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 Visualisation, and as always, please leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @Tableau_Magic.

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