Toan Hoang

Drawing Tally Charts in Tableau

Toan Hoang

For me, it is important to try new things with Tableau and to push my creativity and skills. As such, here is a nice and simple tutorial on Drawing Tally Charts in Tableau; this is both simple and fun and should take around 10 minutes to complete. Do enjoy and let me know if you have any questions.

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

Load the following data into Tableau Desktop / Tableau Public. 

Country,Value
United States,16
United Kingdom,12
Canada,8
France,10
Germany,5
India,4
Hong Kong,12
Singapore,15
Mexico,6
Australia,3

Once your data is copied into Tableau, right-click on the data source and click on Edit Data Source… with the Data Source Editor open, paste the following: 

Path,Position
0,1
100,1
0,-1
100,-1

Note: I have hardcoded a maximum of 100 lines. You can always change this value as you see fit.

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 two records for each Country 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)

TC_Value

WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Value]))

Index

IF INDEX() <= [TC_Value] THEN
    INDEX()
ELSE
    NULL
END

TC_Position

WINDOW_MAX(MAX([Position]))

X

IF [Index]%5 = 0 AND [TC_Position] = -1 THEN
    [Index]-4.30
ELSEIF [Index]%5 = 0 AND [TC_Position] = 1 THEN
    [Index]-0.70
ELSE
    [Index]
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 update the cosmetics of this data visualisation:

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

and boom, we are done, you can find my data visualisation on Tableau Public at https://public.tableau.com/profile/toan.hoang#!/vizhome/TallyCharts/TallyCharts

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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