In corporate finance, bridge chart is often used to visualize itemized sales/revenue performance during a particular period, such as a quarter or a year.

Bridge chart can be designed using waterfall chart. But we will use a different approach. Here we add itemized AOPs to the mix so that we can visualize the performance against goals for each item.

AOP means annual operation plan which is equivalent to the target in annual financial planning, usually on a quarterly basis.

Another acronym that is going to be used in this post is ARR, annual recurring revenue. It is often regarding the revenue on a quarterly basis and for each item.

The Data Set

We made up a data set for an example, which is very simple. The BeginningARR is the revenue of the previous period or the previous quarter.

We do not need to specify the Ending ARR and AOP because both can be derived from the itemized numbers in the table.

Creating the Bridge Chart

First let's create the chart with ARR values. Because we are going to overlap the ARR values with AOP values, we won't use the waterfall chart approach where the bars are downwardly drawn. 

We will first create a gantt bar chart based on the following values:

• Running_Sum() of ARR values are the cumulative result of ARR leading to total ARR.
• Lookup() with offset -1 will shift the cumulative result to the right by one position.
• ZN() will fill the first position with 0 after the shift towards right.
• MIN(Item)=MAX(Item) is the condition for each item and ELSE is for the total which we force it to be 0 in this case.

For the ARRs, we use Sum(Value) as Size. For the AOPs we use Sum(AOP) as Size. These are all logical following the gantt bar setup. In contrast, in waterfall chart, we have to use negative values for sizes.

A few details

For the AOP label, we don't need it for the BeginningARR because there is none. So the calculation is as follows:

It defines the total and the value per item except the first one (BeginningARR). Note that in the formatting, its prefix is '/ $'.

Click to set a reference point

Hover over a point of interest

Highlight both points with bigger size and different colors

Reset the reference point with a reset button

After we are done with the business, we should not leave the reference point remain highlighted  Thus we created a reset button sheet for resetting the highlighted reference point. First, we need to create 3 values for the 3 reference attributes to be reset with.

For example, the Rest Date is 1/1/1900. The Reset Sales is reset to 0. The Reset Sub Category is None. 

We need 3 parameter actions from the reset button sheet to reset the 3 attributes.

De-select the reference point and the reset button

In a Tableau dashboard, when we select/click a data mark, such as a reference point or the reset button in our case, it will stay selected until we click somewhere else. This is not good for us because we may not click anywhere soon. So we will apply a de-select action right away to the sheet in question. 

We need to create two fields with True and False each as values. And place them in the Details of the sheets in question. 

Here is the de-select filter action for the reset button:

There you go. It is not a complex dashboard in principle. We just have quite a few steps to get it done. It's a good exercise for playing with parameter actions.

Feel free to download the companion workbook and play with it. Leave comment below or contact me at twitter @aleksoft if you have questions.

The show/hide buttons in containers and also in sheets allow us to create drill down functionalities in Tableau dashboards. Actually they make it simple to drill down in more ways than before.

Drill down with fixed sized containers

Here is an example. Given a simple bar chart by category.

Then with the click of a button, we can look into more details such Quarterly Profit and Regional Quarterly Sales.

In some of the earlier drill down techniques, we have to create a drill down with the same chart type or in the same hierarchy. Now we are no longer constrained by such limitations. We can display any kind of details as long as they are put in a container.

Steps to create a collapsible container:

1. Right click the dropdown menu at top right corner of a container.
2. Select "Add a show/hide button".
3. This creates a floating button by default. Uncheck the floating option to make it a tiled one.
4. Drag and place the button object right under the Category name. This requires a vertical container to contain the Category name and the button. Then this vertical container and the bar are placed in a horizontal container. (See the picture above) Check out the companion workbook for more details.
5. Edit the button to add images (see below) for opening/closing the container.
6. Add left paddings to the details container to shift the charts to the right, if you wish.
7. Add Max Sales per category as a reference line to normalize all the bars.

Repeat the process for the two other categories. Then we will have a dashboard with drill down functionalities. Below is the fully extended dashboard view.

Drill down with elastic charts