Embedding Mundane Charts with Pareto Insights

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. It shows how a majority of outputs may come from a high concentration of inputs. It may bring risk to business as described by Sharon.

Pareto is usually created as a standalone chart. Here I would like to present a simple technique that allows us to embed Pareto insights into some rather mundane charts that everyone can create. This way we all can use simple charts to show great insights to our stakeholders.

Bar Chart with Pareto Insights

Let's build a bar chart showing the sales by state using the Superstore data set. Nothing extraordinary.

1. Sort the State dimension by Sales, descendingly.
2. Create the following formula, compute over the State and place it on the Color shelf.

Voila. By simple coloring, we just added Pareto insights to the bar chart, thus showing the top 15 states (by sales) that contribute ~80% to the total sales. The top 15 states make up ~30% of all US 50 states.

In addition to the common ranking by sales, we now have Pareto stats: 80% of sales by 30% of states.

This may make the chart more valuable to the stakeholders as an analytical tool. For the viz designer, it doesn't cost anything.

More Mundane Charts with Pareto Insights

In the same token, we can add Pareto stats to other mundane charts as below which includes Horizontal Bar chart, Map, Bubble chart, Treemaps, Pie chart and a table. The map with Pareto insights is particularly interesting. It visualizes where the top states by sales are located, which make up 80% of national sales.

You can download the workbook to look into the implementation details.

More Pareto Details

We may add more Pareto stats to the chart by placing them in the tooltips. You can get the formulas from the workbook. 

Leave comments if you have questions.