Innovative Tableau

Chapter 22. 3 Ways to Make Stunning Scatter Plots: Tip 1

When it comes to my favorite chart types, scatter plots are a close third behind bar charts and line graphs. In several industries, and especially scientific journals, scatter plots are the favorite choice because of their ability to reveal and communicate correlations. Another benefit of this chart type is that it is one of the few visualizations that allow you to view many marks in a small space. No, you cannot analyze every individual mark, because they will likely overlap, but scatter plots make it easy to identify outliers and the aforementioned correlations.

But wait...there’s more! Because of the way scatter plots are set up with a measure on each axis, adding reference lines for the average of each axis creates a natural four-quadrant segmentation. This is a great technique for isolating different groups so that you can act on them individually.

The next three chapters show you how to make scatter plots and take them to the next level in three ways:

• How to use a formatting trick to make your scatter plots stand out

• How a calculated field can automatically break your dimension members into four usable segments

• How to make connected scatter plots

How to Make a Scatter Plot in Tableau

Scatter plots are created with two to four measures and zero or more dimensions. The first two measures form the y-axis and x-axis; then you can use the third and/or fourth measures, as well as dimensions, to add context to ...