Practical Tableau

Chapter 45. How to Make Dumbbell Charts

Tableau dumbbell charts, also known as DNA charts, are an alternative visualization choice for illustrating the change between two data points. Dumbbell charts get their slang name from their appearance, which look similar to weights, and sometimes strands of DNA, when they are in a horizontal orientation.

I personally love that there is an outside-of-the-box chart type that isn’t named after a delicious food such as donuts or waffles. You may even say that dumbbell charts are a healthy alternative…

Names aside, this is another chart type that I find to be engaging, effective, and relatively easy to create in Tableau. This tutorial will illustrate how to make a dumbbell chart in Tableau in just a few steps.

How to Make Tableau Dumbbell Charts

Tableau dumbbell charts are actually dual-axis combination charts, where one of the axes has a mark type of Circle and the other has a mark type of Line. For this tutorial, we will re-create this visualization, which compares the year-over-year sales per sub-category in the Sample - Superstore dataset:

The first step to creating a dumbbell chart in Tableau is to create a dot plot with the measure and dimension you want to visualize. In this example, I will place the Sales measure from the Sample – Superstore dataset onto the Columns Shelf and the Sub-Category dimension onto the Rows Shelf. This creates ...