3/28/2014
A Graph Recreation in Tableau - Part 3: Multiple Charts
It seems the activity continues over my post showing the sankey-style slopegraph in Tableau here and the instructions on how to build it are here. What an amazing Tableau community out there. A number of people have already been playing with this and Tableau Zen Master Mark Jackson posted on Twitter a great use of this, showing the NCAA bracket ranking of Round 1 vs. Round 2. We started talking about adding Round 3 and we were brainstorming earlier this evening on how to do this.
My first approach was to copy and past the data from the previous instructions extending the Xval. Basically 49 data points for each state with Xval from 1 to 2 and then a new set of data points with Xval from 2.4 to 3.9. The only reason for the gap was for the labels in between (but I didn't end up needing this). This approach worked perfectly, but it doubled the size of the data. I realized that I could keep the same Xval range without doubling the data by just adding a few more fields.
I created a new field for curve2 that uses the 2014 estimate (made up data) vs. 2013. I also created a Color2 and Size2 that did the same thing. Then I created two sheets. One plotting the original "curve" and one plotting "curve2". After making the axis and format identical on both sheets I dumped them together on a dashboard. Note the first sheet has a fixed axis from .5 to 2.5, while the second sheet starts at 1 and goes to 2.5. As a final touch I also added two dashboard highlight actions, one for each sheet and highlighting the other. This creates a really nice hover effect for the overall dashboard.
I hope you find this helpful. If you have any questions feel free to email me at Jeff@DataPlusScience.com
Congrats to John Mathis on winning the Tableau Sports Visualization Contest. Good luck at IronViz!
