Tableau · Quick Reference

Lesson 9 — Advanced Visualizations Cheat Sheet

Tableau

In one line: The most common mistake analysts make is using the wrong chart type. A waterfall chart for showing category comparison is confusing; a bar chart for showing cumulative financial...

Key Ideas

1Choosing the Right Advanced Chart. The most common mistake analysts make is using the wrong chart type. A waterfall chart for showing category comparison is confusing; a bar chart for showing cumulative...

2Heatmaps — Seeing Patterns in Two Dimensions. A heatmap (also called a highlight table or cross-tab with color) plots two categorical dimensions against each other and uses color to encode a measure. The result le...

3Treemaps — Size + Color for Part-to-Whole. A treemap represents hierarchical data as nested rectangles. Each rectangle's size encodes one measure (like total sales) and its color encodes a second measure (like ...

4Gantt Charts — Project Timelines & Duration. Gantt charts show tasks, their start dates, and their durations as horizontal bars along a time axis. Every project manager uses them. In Tableau, you build them using...

5Bullet Charts — KPI vs. Target. Designed by data visualization expert Stephen Few, the bullet chart is the ideal chart for showing whether a KPI is hitting its target. It shows three things simultane...