Vizible Difference

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.

A colleague posted this: "Hi Team, may I ask if you have any good idea to show the % difference of two randomly selected data points on a line chart?"

I found a solution to it, which is as follows.

- Click to set one point as a reference

- Hover over another point 

- Show the difference between the two points in tooltips

Both click and hover are actions that allow us to save a point's attributes into parameters. Then we can calculate the difference easily.

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.