Innovative Tableau

Chapter 24. 3 Ways to Make Stunning Scatter Plots: Tip 3

How to Make Connected Scatter Plots

As I mentioned in Chapter 22, the scatter plot is already my third favorite for its innate ability to visualize many records at once, reveal correlations and outliers, and create a natural four-quadrant segmentation. One weakness of scatter plots, however, is that they don’t clearly show how a dimension member’s position is changing over time. Fortunately, Tableau’s flexibility allows us to go far beyond the defaults and Show Me options and, in this case, can help us to literally connect the dots on a scatter plot.

With connected scatter plots, it is much easier to compare the paths of dimension members as their respective intersections on the x- and y-axes change from period to period. This chapter shows you how to make connected scatter plots in Tableau and how to use a dual axis to make the visualization more engaging and display the point order of each mark.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to make a scatter plot that connects marks by year and is colored by any dimension of your choosing. You will also be able to communicate the order of the marks by using a table calculation on the Label Marks Card:

You can use the following technique with any fields, but for this tutorial, we lay the foundation of a scatter plot by using the Sample – Superstore dataset with ...