Innovative Tableau

Chapter 44. How to Make Ranged Dot Plots in Tableau

Ranged dot plots display not only a circle mark, or dot, representing the current performance for a specific dimension member, but a full range of how that dot has moved over time. You can add even more context by coloring the dot and/or changing the mark type of the circle to up or down triangles based on period-over-period performance.

Both of these additions to a traditional dot plot help provide comparisons that paint a clearer picture of whether changes in performance are notable. This chapter shows you how to add a performance range for each dimension member represented in a dot plot.

How to Make a Dot Plot with a Performance Range for Each Dimension Member

By the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to make a dot plot showing the period-over-period performance across dimension members with a performance range for each dimension member in the background:

Let’s knock out the traditional dot plot portion of this chart first. You can create this chart with any measures and dimensions, but, here, we look at current month’s sales by region in the Sample – Superstore dataset.

For ease of illustration, I have parameterized the current month selection so that the user can choose any month between January and December as the current month. Also, the sample data has four years of data in it, but we will aggregate all four years ...