Tableau Basics: Use Modulo Calculation to Distribute Visualizations on a View

Contributed by: Christopher Gardner

Difficulty level: Advanced

Your managers have asked you to develop some charts visualizing the company’s profit over the past four years. Specifically, they are interested in the profit of each state and province. Which states or provinces are showing growth and which are starting to decline? You develop a bar chart showing profit over the four years and provide them with a filter; however, one of the managers informs you that the filter menu is cumbersome. They want to compare the states and provinces, but it’s difficult to do when the scales on the chart change and you can only see one state or province at a time. They want to see them all together, side by side.

At this point, you start worrying that you might have to create a chart for each state and province and then tile them out on a dashboard. This would be easy using the duplicate chart feature in Tableau, but it would be extremely time consuming. How can you build a panel of charts showing all this information without building a separate chart for each state and province? Trellis charts provide a grid of visualizations, allowing you to see multiple charts at once. We can build one in Tableau by utilizing simple calculations involving simple division and modulo to find remainders.

Simple Trellis

Let’s start with the basics. In the Sample Superstore dataset that is built into Tableau desktop, there are approximately ...