Workout Wednesday 2019 Week 6 – ‘Tree Charts’

This week’s #WorkoutWednesday visualised the number of orders per week and the size of those orders based on the Sum of Sales, all in a chart that looks like a row of trees. I like the original design and look of these charts.

I first filtered the data to 2018 and then built out a first draft of the chart using a dual axis – one mark as bars for the ‘trunk’ (centre line) of the tree and a second as circles, using a Count Distinct of Order IDs as the measure for both axes, with Segment on Rows:

The issue with this build is that the circles were overlapping. So I forced the marks to stack by changing this setting to On:

This got me a lot closer. Note, I also wrapped the Segment in an UPPER() formula to make it all caps per Ann’s design, as well as renaming the axis to “# ORDERS”:

It was then necessary to sort the Order IDs so the largest order (by Sum of Sales) was at the base of the ‘tree’:

This had the following effect and seemed to match to the requirements across all the Segments:

Viz in Tooltip

For this challenge, when hovering over one of the orders, a table should show with a breakdown of the Sub-Categories that make up that order along with the Sales and Quantity of each Sub-Category. For example:

The layout for the ViTT was fairly straightforward, but the colouring required separate colour legends to be used. The final layout I used is below:

To get the separate legends for Measure Values, this can be selected from the drop down menu of the Measure Values pill that is on the Colour shelf:

For the Sales measure I used a Custom Sequential orange palette (white to orange). As there shouldn’t be any colour showing on the Quantity column, I used a Custom Diverging palette, but selected both ends of the palette to be white, as below:

And, with some final formatting and tidy up, I think I’m done:

Click image to open in Tableau Public

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, please let me know!