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Help! A Simple Line Chart....Feeling dumber the more i use Tableau
Posted May 23rd, 2008 by JMSidhu
I feel dumber and clumsier each time I use Tableau.
All I want to create is a simple line chart. I can't seem to manage to produce what I want.
I want to produce something like the below (from Excel, yuck) but with the formatting options of Tableau.
I want to develop the facility with the tool to do this painlessly (as I can in Excel) with my preferred tool (Tableau).
I have not been able to suss it out. This has got to be easy. Why can I not figure out how to do it?
I have attached a sample picture and a tab-separated TXT file.
Help please. Tell me if it is me or the tool.
-Jonathan
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| trend.png | 5.95 KB |
| TrendData.txt | 821 bytes |
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Comments
That data is already heavily summarized, but is this what you want? (See attachment of 3.6 twbx)
No, not quite. I would like to be able to at a single TYPE but have all three series on the same plot in order to see the variance from H.
Hi,
As far as having a continuous date plot: if your source data truly, really does not have a fully formatted date, then you can create a calculation inside of Tableau that does this. Once you have it, then you mark the date dimension as "MY". Lastly, best-practice for lines is to *not* format them (dashes, etc, like your image shows). However, you *can* alter both the size and color of the lines to gain the insight you are looking for. See attached revised twbx file "line2". Hope this helps! -Ty
Thank you.
I appreciate it. The data really, truly does not have a fully formatted date.
But what you have shown is not quite what I am looking for.
I would like to see a single TYPE (e.g. ISS) on a single plot where H is the ideal and G & I are shown are variances from H.
This view would repeat by TYPE BCS and then for the total as well.
Its definitely possible to do what you want, and a whole lot more with Tableau. See the attached tableau workbook. Its meant to be read sequentially (see the caption for each worksheet). The first worksheet is what you asked for I believe, and the other 20 or so (I got carried away) either show details about how to create it, or other things you can tell from your data, or other interesting views.
BTW, it is usually MUCH better to use Tableau on the raw detail level data, than to work with just a summary produced by some other process (as in this case). With just the high level summary to go on, you can't examine the distribution of data, nor drill down for detail.
It would also be simpler if your input data did not mix strings and numbers in the same column, but that can be tolerated using a calculated field.
Still, it was a bit interesting to see how much was possible with just this summary. Take a look at all the worksheets, don't just stop at the first one.
Another Option is to use a dashboard. Sometime bars are better for showing variance.
See attached.
I have DL'd the file you attached but it does not show any data upon opening it.
To your comment on raw data vs. summarized data. Please explain further.
Many times, the data we are working with is already summarized.
I don't know why you can't read the twbx file I uploaded; others have been able to read it. You need Tableau 3.5 or greater.
What do you mean there is no data attached? Its a packaged workbook based on an Excel file made from your example text.
What do you see when you open it? You should see a workbook with many tabs, each having some kind of chart.
Regarding my comment about summary data; you can use Tableau to look at data where someone just gives you summaries of the data (e.g. min, mean, max, total etc), but you can do much MORE effective analysis if you work with the complete data directly.
Push back on the folks giving you the summaries and try to get the raw detail. Unless there are privacy restrictions, they probably can give you access. At least get a sample of the raw data, so you can see what you can do with it using Tableau.
If someone tells you the median income in your county is $60K; your county will look very different if everyone makes near $60K than it will if most people are destitute, and there are just a few folks that are fabulously wealthy. You can't distinguish between those two (and many other) cases if all you have is the one summary statistic.
If you get the raw data, you can show all values on scatter charts to visually see the distribution of data, plot trend lines to fit data to lines and curves to predict future trends, show the distribution using histograms, drill down into individual outliers to see their details ...
You can't do any of that if you only work with the summary statistics as input. In that case, you've already thrown away much of the rich information before you even start your Tableau analysis.
That's a great example workbook - some really nice work done on those charts!
Andy
When I downloaded Alex's sample workbook and opened it with Tableau 3.6 it showed a couple of the calculated fields in an error state (red exclamation mark), and all the sheets were blank.
The problem was that it was treating I_String as a number, not a string, so the I_Float and I_Deviation calculations didn''t work. Right clicking on I_String and changing the data type to string fixed it and all the sheets then displayed.
I'm puzzled why that should have happened - maybe that's what some of the other posters have found. Obviously it won't have been like that when it was uploaded. I wonder if it's affected by locale settings, or something.
Anyway - well worth downloading the workbook and fixing it up if necessary - this is a fabulous demonstration of what can be achieved with Tableau. If you can do all that with data that has had all the richness aggregated out, Alex, I'd love to see what you could do with the raw data!