Hi everyone out there . Hope you guys are learning from the posts and are having a hands on practice in tableau side by side. In the previous blog under the series Tableau Charts we discussed about Box And Whisker Plots . Today we will discuss about Bullet Graphs in tableau . A bullet graph also sometime called as a target bar chart is used when we want to compare a measure with a target value. Lets say in our superstore data we would like to compare the Sales of Subcategories in a year with respect to the previous year to see how much we have achieved as compared to the previous year sales . A bullet graph is the best to visualize this scenario.
Lets go ahead and build our bullet graph and try to see how our sub category sales are in 2015 as compared to 2014.
Before we do that we will have to create a calculated field to calculate 2014 and 2015 sales. To do this we will use IF statement .
Create two calculated field for 2014 and 2015 Sales as shown below :
2015 Sales:
2014 Sales
If you know about Datepart function well and good . Don’t panic if you don’t know about it . We will discuss it later when we talk about Dates in tableau in blogs to come.
Once we have our Sales calculated for these two years lets build our Bullet Graph and see how we interpret it.
Select Sales 2014 , Sales 2014 from the measure and Subcategory from the dimesion. Once you select these you will see the Bullet Graph chart to be higlighted in the show me tab. Click on it t o generate a bullet graph chart .
This is what you should be seeing on your screen now:
We have our bullet graph ready .
This graph has four major components. The vertical small line is the sales of 2014 which can be thought of as the Target value. The blue horizontal line represents the sales of 2015 . When we notice the graph we see that we have a grey bar that sorrounds the blue bars. The dark and light grey bars represent 60% and 80% Sales of 2014 respectively (our target value).
I hope this is clear to you. In case of any doubts please mention it in comments. I will be glad to answer them.
