Practical Tableau

Chapter 26. How to Make Bullet Graphs

Bullet graphs are a variation of the bar chart invented by Stephen Few. Bullet graphs are one of my go-to chart types and are often featured prominently throughout my dashboards because I find that when I use them, I hear the question “So what?” less often. As powerful as bar charts are at communicating data, when viewed in a vacuum—or without additional context—their comparisons are limited to only the dimension members that are displayed in the chart. Bullet graphs improve on the bar chart by providing additional points of comparison. For example, in addition to showing a bar for widget sales, a bullet graph would also include a point of comparison that shows either last year’s sales or a target sales amount. Further, bullet graphs can include shading to illustrate how close your sales number is to last year’s number or your target.

While I find this to be one of the most powerful visualization types, it took me some time to wrap my head around how to make them when I was getting started with Tableau. Bullet graphs are a “Show Me” option in Tableau, but I found that this option was not always providing the results that I expected. Once I figured out that bullet graphs are simply a combination of bars and reference lines, it was much easier for me to create them. The good news is that if you can create a bar chart in Tableau, you can create bullet graphs!

In this chapter, we will re-create the following chart:

How to Make Bullet Graphs ...