Use Tableau to Create Better Bar Charts

Contributed by: Carl Allchin

Difficulty level: Beginner

When you first start learning about data visualization, you will repeatedly hear how bar charts are the best way to visualize data in most scenarios. Largely this is true. Tableau Desktop is designed to help you deliver visualizations that meet the common best practices. When you start to analyze your data in Tableau, by default the software will often create a bar chart for you. Yet, I’ve found a number of occasions when a few stylistic changes can make Tableau’s default bar charts even better.

I first learned this shortcut from Ryan Sleeper, an early Tableau Zen Master, founder of Playfair Data, and fellow O’Reilly author.

Let’s create a basic bar chart in Tableau using the demo dataset of Superstore Sales. I’ve put Category and Sub-Category on the Rows shelf and sum(Sales) on the Columns shelf.

Figure 1. Basic bar chart

You might notice there are many faint gray lines in the background of the bar chart. Those are known as gridlines, and are included to help the viewer reference where the end of the bar is compared to the values shown on the axis. A lot of the other gray lines are known as pane lines and dividers. These are more aesthetic to help break the view into sections of headers or break the data points into the various categorical groups. Most users want to get rid of ...