Tableau Cookbook – Recipes for Data Visualization

Creating an Area chart

In a very simplistic way, an Area chart is a stacked line chart. It is an essentially a line chart where the space between each line and the next line is filled with a color. These charts are typically used to show the relative proportions of totals or percentage relationships. This type of chart is not the best way to show specific values along the line, but it can clearly show the total values so you can get an idea of how a dimension contributes to an overall trend.

Getting ready

The Area chart is an extension of the Line Chart and hence we will work on the line chart that we created earlier. In the Line chart recipe, we showed the profit for every month over the last four years. For the Area Chart, we will show the sales ...