In my previous post on labeling trellis chart, I only showed how to label at the top left corner. People like Chipo Chirewa may want to label elsewhere.

Here I would show how to label anywhere in a trellis cell, like places other than the top left corner.

Vertical Alignment of Labels

In the demo workbook of the previous post, the label height is determined by the axis field

  • Window_Max(1) 

with fixed vertical axis range from 0 to 1. This places the data mark at the top.

Given the same axis range from 0 to 1, Window_Max(0.5) places the data mark in the middle and Window_Max(0) places the data mark at the bottom.

In the demo workbook for this post, we use a parameter for the vertical alignment which has possible values in (1, 0.5, 0).

Horizontal Alignment of Labels

In the demo workbook of the previous post, the label field formula is as follows

  • IF First()=0 Then Window_Max(Max(Country Name)) End

This places the label on the left. For placing the label on the right, we should write the formula like

  • IF Last()=0 Then Window_Max(Max(Country Name)) End

For placing the label in the center, we can write the formula as follows,

  • IF Index()=Int(Size()/2) Then Window_Max(Max(Country Name)) End

Size() computed along Date is the number of months. Size()/2 gives approximately the center position of the data mark, depending on even or odd number of months. To fine-tune the position of the mark, we added a parameter Horizontal Offset with values from -10 to 10. Then the formula becomes:

  •  IF Index()=Int(Size()/2)+Horizontal Offset Then Window_Max(Max(Country Name)) End

Another way to fine tune the horizontal position of the label, is to insert spaces before the label.

Note that we need to set the alignment for the label to be Middle-Center in Tableau:

We use a parameter for the 3 horizontal alignment options.

Here is the link to the demo workbook. With the horizontal offset, we can place the labels anywhere horizontally. If we wish, we can add a vertical offset as well. Basically, it's possible that we can place a label anywhere. 

In general, a design only needs a single option. You just take one of the options above. It should work out.

Feel free to leave comments below or contact me at twitter @aleksoft.
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Labels: Trellis Chart
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  1. Hi Alex - very cool and useful post. Question: if we want to add more than one label - would that be possible? Let's stay we want Country label to be left aligned and a different measure (like % change of Sales) to be right-aligned. Would it just be a matter of creating another calculated field for the additional label?

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    2. Sharon, just wrote up another post on placing multiple labels within a trellis cell. Check it out https://vizdiff.blogspot.com/2022/01/placing-multiple-labels-in-trellis-chart.html

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(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.

(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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