By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email. You can follow him on LinkedIn or sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
There are a lot of great chart types in Tableau that get a lot of air time. Bar charts are great for comparing values, ranking and sorting. Line graphs are great for displaying chronological progress an variability. Scatter plots are great for visualizing the correlation between two measures.
How about for understanding ranges of values when there are numerous data points? I don't think there's a chart type which is as strongly associated with that scenario as the scenarios above. Maybe a box and whisker plot comes to mind for some, but I'm guessing that chart isn't in most Tableau users' regular lineup.
Box and whisker plots are great tools for the right audience, but are overwhelming for others. Trying to explain about the mean, percentile benchmarks and inter-quartile ranges might leave a lot of audiences glassy-eyed.
So why not simplify? One of my favorite, underutilized charts is a dot plot! A dot plot is like a 2-D Scatter Plot and it's great for visualizing ranges of data. Often, I'll pop an average line on the chart for reference so the user can compare across categories as well. I hope this chart type serves you well!
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