Subtitle: Sunburst Chart with Labels Inside and Categorical Sequential Colors

Here I am presenting how to design Sunburst Chart with practical considerations, such as:

  • Labels inside
  • Categorical sequential colors with dynamic data.
The design will be based on map layers, a new feature since Tableau desktop version 2020.4. This post by Sebastian Depalla is a great source of inspiration.

First, here are two very important techniques when dealing with map layers.

Turn off Map Background

  • This is actually the last step. After you have done all the following steps, turn off the map background: set Menu Map>Background Maps to None. Once it's off, you can't add layers.

Size the View 

  • Use Ctrl-Shift-B/Ctrl-B to increase/decrease the size of the entire view (all layers included)
  • Use the Size card to the max

Create Center

  • Use the formula MAKEPOINT(0,0) to create a field called Center.

Create Subcategory Pie Layer

Drag the field Center to the view. Change the data mark to Pie. Drag the fields to the Mark's cards exactly as in the following screenshot.
  1. Size the view with Ctrl-Shift-B as big as you can. 
  2. Place Category above Subcategory.
  3. Sort either of them by the field Sales descendingly.
  4. Place Sum(Sales) in Color. Edit Color using deep gray to create sequential color.
  5. Click Color card and set the color opacity to be ~55%

Create Category Pie Layer

Drag the field Center to the view and create a new layer. Change the data mark to Pie. Drag the fields to the Mark's cards exactly as in the following screenshot.
  1. Size the pie with the Size card and make it smaller than the Subcategory pie. Leave enough spaces for labels. 
  2. Place Category above Subcategory.
  3. Sort either of them by the field Sales descendingly.
  4. Place Category in Color and Subcategory in Label.
  5. Set the Label font color to white (showing labels in black for illustrative purpose only )

Create White Circle Layer

Drag the field Center to the view and create a new layer. Change the data mark to Pie. Drag the fields to the Mark's cards exactly as in the following screenshot.
  1. Size the pie with the Size card and make it smaller than the Category pie. Leave enough spaces for labels. 
  2. Place Category in Label.
  3. Sort Category by the field Sales descendingly.
  4. Set Color to white. (showing black border for illustrative purpose only)
  5. Set the Label font color to be white (showing labels in black for illustrative purpose only )

Create Background Layer

Put this layer under the Subcategory layer will generate categorical sequential colors. 

Drag the field Center to the view. Change the data mark to Pie. Drag the fields to the Mark's cards exactly as in the following screenshot.
  1. Size the pie with the Size card to the Max. 
  2. Sort Category by the field Sales descendingly.
  3. Place Category in Color.

Put Layers in Order

The order of layers is as follows:
Drag the layers to arrange them in the above order.

Voila. It's done. You can download the demo workbook here.

If questions, leave comment or contact me via twitter @aleksoft

PS: Fine-Tuning the Labels (6-Layer Sunburst Chart)

In the above workbook, we included a 6-layer Sunburst chart as well. The idea is to allow us to fine tune the position of the labels.

By default Tableau places the labels very close to the exterior of the circle. We can manually move the labels individually to a different place. It's not good for dynamic data visualization.

To make the position of the labels tunable and predictable, we added a transparent pie layer. For example, we can insert a Transparent Pie layer between the White layer and the Category layer, and place the Category labels on the transparent pie. By tuning the size of the latter via the Size card, we can determine the location (radius) of the labels. 

To make a pie transparent, we only need to set a regular pie's color opacity to be 0%. Note that the transparent pie has exactly the same dimensions and measure as the one that it puts labels on. It is smaller in size (radius) and is transparent.

In the 6-layer dashboard, we inserted two transparent pies for two sets of labels: Category and Subcategory. 
You can see that the labels are placed a bit more away from the circles than the default placement by Tableau.


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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.

(Addendum: Jonathan Drummey has a much better Tableau-only solution that I missed from his presentation. I only caught later part of the presentation. You might ask him about it if you know him.)

In a recent presentation, Tableau visionary HOF Jonathan Drummey talked about a solution for a variable row heights in a text table. The question apparently came from a perfectionist tableau designer. Tableau is not really made for text processing.

[Forward: I asked ChatGPT o1-mini who then wrote this. Hope it helps. All the credit and the blame go to ChatGPT.

I went over the plan and it looked decent. Whether it can be done in 30 days or not, it depends on the person and the time he spends on it. By the way, ChatGPT can be a really good study buddy. Ask it questions whenever you have any.]

This comprehensive 30-day plan is designed to take you from a Tableau beginner to an advanced user.

Mundane charts are those basic ones that all data visualization beginners can create, possibly with Show Me in Tableau. They are the boring ones at times because many people tend to create fancier ones just to show off. 

I actually like the mundane ones a lot because they are not only easy to create but also easy to be read by the stakeholders.

Pareto chart is a very powerful tool, providing great insights into the data set and into the business at stake.

A while ago, Sharon came to me asking a question regarding Pareto Chart Multiples. That is, per each category, there is a Pareto chart. And we need to create Pareto charts for all the categories. This chart allows us to quickly view the few most important factors that matter to the majority of output in each category. 

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) is the father of the 80/20 rule: 80% of output are produced by 20% of input. It works magically well through all the years.

[Update: The product manager Wilson Po alerted me that the Viz Extension is still a work in progress. It will not be part of the incoming version 2024.1. Instead, it will be released later in 2024. Just be patient]

Tableau 2024.1 is coming. I got a chance to test drive it. As I wrote a bunch of posts on Sankey chart tutorials in the past, I am most excited by the new Sankey chart type. Here I would like to share what I learnt. This is a quick preview. Your comments are welcome.

Buzzfeed recently asked Midjourney to draw images of people in 50 US states.  So the AI drawing tool created 50 images of couples that represent its perception of the people in each state.

I just put the images into a tiled map in Tableau. Each image is added as a background in each tile.

And also I added Viz-in-tooltips to enlarge an image to look at more details.

Feel free to download the workbook and explore it.
1

The folks at Business Expert had a brilliant idea. They asked AI's perception on UK banks as a dog. I am inspired to do the same on US banks.

ChatGPT is asked to confess its perceptions on top US banks as a dog. Then Midjourney is tasked to generate the images. Check out what dog is matched to your favorite bank.

All are put together into a single-sheet Tableau dashboard. Feel free to check it out.

Through my previous post on the new Sankey chart type, I got in touch with Wilson, the product manager leading the development of this new chart type. I made some comments on creating multi-level Sankey via cascading of single Sankey's. He told me it can be done already by dropping more dimensions into the Level card.

As an enthusiastic user of Sankey charts, I am excited to learn that a Sankey chart type is being piloted in Tableau Public (Web Edit only). I wrote about Sankey chart design in multiple posts. Sankey chart may appear in different forms depending on applications. 

I played a little with it just to evaluate it. Here are my initial findings and comments.

1. The basic Sankey

I can quickly create a Sankey with 2 dimensions and 1 measure.
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