Practical Tableau

Chapter 8. Five Ways to Make a Bar Chart/An Introduction to Aggregation

Now that we’ve gone through some fundamental topics, such as dimension versus measure and discrete versus continuous, and you have an overview of the authoring interface, you’re ready to start creating visualizations in Tableau. This chapter shares five different ways to create a bar chart and provides an introduction to the topic of aggregation.

Perhaps the most important lesson from this chapter is a line I hear myself saying almost every day: there is always more than one way to do the same thing in Tableau. You will find your own techniques, form your own habits, and hear different opinions—and they likely will all have merit. You truly can take multiple paths to get to the same end result in Tableau. We are about to discuss five different ways to create a bar chart, and it’s not even a comprehensive list!

Five Ways to Create a Bar Chart in Tableau

Option #1

The easiest way to start a bar chart in Tableau is to simply double-click the measure you want to visualize from the Measures area of the Data pane. Let’s double-click the Sales measure. By default, this will place a continuous pill for Sales on the Rows Shelf, which creates a vertical bar.

Option #2

You could have got to this same place by left-clicking and dragging the Sales measure from the Measures area of the Data pane to the Rows Shelf.

Option # 3

“Pre-select” the Sales measure by clicking it, then click “horizontal bars” in the Show Me ...