Chapter 44. How to Make Dynamic Dual-Axis Bump Charts
Bump charts are an effective way to show how dimension members are ranking across different measures over time. For example, you may want to see how specific product categories have ranked in sales for your company from year to year. Or maybe you want to use discrete months as your element of time to see if the rankings for product categories change based on seasonality. Or maybe you want to do something outside of work and see how your fantasy football players are ranking across different statistics from week to week!
Whatever the case may be, I’ve found bump charts to be an engaging and easy-to-interpret means of visualizing ranks over time. Fellow Tableau Zen Master, Matt Chambers, created one of the most popular Tableau Public visualizations of the year with a bump chart and provided his technique at his site, Sir Viz-a-Lot.
In addition to being engaging and easy to understand, this chart type is very easy to make in Tableau.
This tutorial will show you how to make bump charts in Tableau, but also how to leverage a dual-axis to provide additional context on the view, and how to allow the end user to choose the measure being ranked and the dimension members being compared.
How to Make Bump Charts in Tableau
For the first part of the tutorial, we will re-create this bump chart that shows us how the segments from the Sample – Superstore dataset rank between January and December for the SUM(Sales) measure:
To create a ...
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