How To Create a Gauge Chart in Tableau (UPDATED)
A while back I wrote a post on how to create a gauge chart in Tableau. At the time I felt bad about writing it because I thought it was a bad chart. I have since come around on the gauge. See my previous post on bullets vs gauges for mobile dashboards. And this created some convo on the Twitters about the merits of the gauge. But I think it's an unfairly maligned chart type.
So I think this should be an available chart type to create simply in Tableau. But the old approach I outlined required too much data re-shaping. So at last year's Tableau Conference I presented a new way of creating a gauge that required no data re-shaping. Just a bit of math. Outlined below are updated steps for creating a gauge in Tableau.
Most Popular Beatles Songs
This data visualization shows the popularity of Beatles songs using the Spotify API. I then assigned each song to a songwriter using Wikipedia data from an old Beatles project.
This is a new type of visualization I am calling a Marimekko Slope Plot. It combines several chart types and communicates a lot of information. The bar width shows the sample size (number of songs) by a discrete category (songwriter). The dots show a distribution of points (songs) with ability to compare across discrete categories (songwriter). Finally it show trends over time through the area chart slope (song popularity trend). I will post later about other applications of this chart and how it was created in Tableau.
This is a new type of visualization I am calling a Marimekko Slope Plot. It combines several chart types and communicates a lot of information. The bar width shows the sample size (number of songs) by a discrete category (songwriter). The dots show a distribution of points (songs) with ability to compare across discrete categories (songwriter). Finally it show trends over time through the area chart slope (song popularity trend). I will post later about other applications of this chart and how it was created in Tableau.
Triangle Maps in Tableau
This triangle map was inspired by a UK election map in the Financial Times created by Billy Ehrenberg. This map below shows voting results in Wisconsin by county comparing 2012 to 2016 and where Clinton lost compared to Obama. If you are interested in a how-to post let me know in the comments below. Data source: Wikipedia.
Spiral of Unemployment
This is a spiral heatmap of US unemployment rates from 1976 to 2017 by month. This viz was inspired by a similar viz by Tom Shanley created in D3. This version is created in Tableau.
