Chandoo’s excellent Excel and Data blog has a data challenge to win a Kindle. I’m not entering but thought I’d show what Tableau can do with just a few hours of work. The challenge was to create a single chart that showed the data story the best. Below is what I think works, but the visualization also provides the ability to look at the data in different ways (running sum, difference from prior month, and so on) to explore it further (can this still be considered a single chart?).
This workbook has some interesting hacks for Tableau concerning using Measure Values – for example because of my method of flipping between the aggregations means that I can’t show the axis as percent when required, I multiply the field by 100 and put a custom number format of 0.0″%” to fake a percent label. Using this Measure Values method is also useful when you need want the ability to flip between different window partitions.
