Creating Bins Made Easy

This is a sequel to Coding Case Statement Made Easy. This topic came up when a colleague needs to create 25 uniform bins on percentiles. Quite a bit of manual work, isn't it?

It is pretty easy if you create bins of equal size on regular measures or dimensions. You can use the right-click context menu "Create Bins" in Tableau to create them.

It becomes tedious when working with aggregated measures (no context menu available for creating bins), especially when the number of bins is big.

The expected bins are like those in the picture:

There are in total 25 bins between 0 and 1. It takes quite sometime to do it by hand. The accuracy of the code is not guaranteed.

So, Excel can do this pretty handily.

1.Create column A for the bin ticks. Excel can do it by incrementing 0.4 per row. Just by dragging down.

2.Create column B of bin labels from 1 to 25. By dragging down again.

3.Create column C for the code based on A and B through the function Concatenate(), plus dragging down.

Then copy the code to the bin creation formula with some edit.

This applies equally to creating variable-size bins. Then you have to create columns A and B manually.

PS.I thought everyone knew this trick in Excel. But it seems not so. Hope this helps.

(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)

Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button.

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

Go to the target dashboard
Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager
Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest.
Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.
The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help.

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Vizible Difference

In search of data visualization excellence

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

2. Create an show/hide button

3. Add annotations

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