Visualizing Change with Jump Plot

The latest #MakeoverMonday 2018 Week14 project is about world wine production. One of our Makeover Monday Data Camp members Yanning Wang created a simple dashboard for this week. I think that jump plot can make this dashboard a bit more interesting. So, here is the result.

It seems a great use case for the jump plot to visualize YOY change. The amplitude of the jump is representing the scale of the change. The direction of the jump equals up or down. And jump plot is best used to visualize the difference between consecutive check points

YOY change is what happened between two consecutive years. So the check points are the years. Note that the jump plot is based on the Sine function. You can use other math functions to create jump plots if you wish.

This is #TweakThursday 40.

(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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ChatlinauJuly 30, 2018 at 3:03 PM
Alex, thanks for putting this up. I stumbled on this looking for something else, but thought that the jump plot would be a good way to show YY% change over years. I downloaded the workbook but can't replicate the jump plot and can't get my data to work. Would you be willing to help figure out what I'm doing wrong?
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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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