Welcome to the final part of this series of the ‘Visualisation Best Practices for Tableau or Power BI’ tutorials. If you have been following along my series of blogs, you should be familiar by now with planning to create your first visualisation and the four Ws that you need to answer, we also covered pre-attentive attributes – what they are and how to use them.
Alternatively, if you have not read through Part 1 of this series or if you missed Part 2 click the respective links below.
We will now be moving on to Part 3 and answer the following question:
- Which chart types should you use, and when?
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Which chart types should you use and when?
In part two, I listed several types of charts that would be appropriate to use for specific attributes. Now, I will discuss in more detail about each of these charts and when should you use them while providing an example business question that could be answered using the chart type.
Visualising changes over time - with a measure and dates
Line Chart
Business Research Question:
How have monthly sales trends varied across different product categories over the past two years?
Area Chart
Business Research Question:
How have monthly sales trends varied across different product categories over the past two years?
Bump Chart
Business Research Question:
How has the percentage contribution to overall sales changed for different product categories between 2023 and 2024?
Visualising Magnitudes – comparing sizes against multiple categories
Bar Chart
Business Research Question:
Which ship mode generated the highest total sales in the most recent year?
Lollipop Chart
Business Research Question:
How are the total sales distributed across ship modes?
Sized Scatter
Business Research Question:
What is the relationship between total sales and total profit across different product sub-categories?
Visualising deviation - a dimension and measure; includes a Target or Benchmark Value
Diverging Bar Chart
Business Research Question:
What is the total profit or loss for five manufacturers?
Spine Chart
Business Research Question:
Which shipping modes experience the greatest variation between their largest loss and largest gain?
Bullet Chart
Business Research Question:
Which product sub-categories experience an increase or decrease in sales compared to the previous year?
Visualising distribution - understand the spread and shape of the data
Histogram
Business Research Question:
What is the distribution of total quantities purchased?
Box plot
Business Research Question:
How do order quantities vary across different shipping methods?
Dot plot
Business Research Question:
Which customer segments are most and least profitable within each region?
Visualising Correlation - identify relationships between variables
Scatterplot
Business Research Question:
What is the relationship between total sales and total profit across product sub-categories?
Heat Map (Highlight Table)
Business Research Question:
How does the contribution of weekday sales vary across quarters?
Bar vs. Line
Business Research Question:
Which sub-categories generate the highest sales relative to the quantity sold?
Visualising a Part-to-Whole - compare proportions within a total using a dimension and measure
Tree map
Business Research Question:
What proportion of total sales does each region contribute?
Donut Chart
Business Research Question:
What proportion of total sales does each region contribute?
Stacked Bar Chart
Business Research Question:
What proportion of total sales does each Ship mode contribute per Region?
Visualising Ranking with a dimension and measure to focus on order rather than raw values
Ordered Bar Chart
Business Research Question:
How do the different ship modes rank based on their total sales?
Lollipop Chart
Business Research Question:
Which product ship mode ranks highest by total sales in the most recent year?
Slope Chart
Business Research Question:
How do the different ship modes rank based on their average sales from 2023 to 2024?
Visualising Spatial - understand geographic patterns in data with geographic dimension and measure
Filled Map
Business Research Question:
Which states generate the highest volume of sales?
Sized Dot Plot Map
Business Research Question:
Which cities generate the highest volume of sales?
Heat Density Map
Business Research Question:
Where are the densest clusters of customer activity located?
Final Dashboard Design tips
Prioritize Simplicity and Clarity
Have you heard of ‘too much of a good thing’?
Well, this applies to visualisations and dashboarding.
Your data might be vast, and the insights might be overwhelming but adding it all to your visualisations can produce a chaotic and cluttered dashboard that has too much information.
Ensure that your viewer can answer a few select questions by viewing your dashboard and are not left more puzzled or astounded than before looking at your dashboard.
Moreover, think about ‘saving ink’. Imagine that you might print out a copy of your dashboard – how many borders, gridlines and colours have you used? Would your printer very quickly run out of ink if you were to give out copies of your dashboard?
Design with Hierarchy in Mind
Finally, lead with the golden nuggets, leave the granularity for last. Remember that most people would expect to see the most important insights or visualisations on the top left while you would expect to see the least important visualisations on the bottom right. This keeps the viewer engaged and able to follow your dashboard with ease.
If possible, create visual cues or text that can help the viewer navigate your dashboard.
Conclusion
We have now come to the conclusion of this series of ‘Visualisation Best Practices for Tableau or Power BI’
We have covered in, great, detail an extensive list of chart types that you can use – simultaneously considering applications for the chart types. I now leave in your hands this comprehensive series of guides on visualisation best practices. It is now your turn to build a dashboard that will enlighten your audience with the story you will tell.
Go forth and create. Go forth and dashboard!
