Tableau is one the most sought-after Business Intelligence tools, and it is very popular among its competitors. It is a robust and flexible solution that is very easy to use. It provides detailed visualizations of data but in a simple manner. These visualizations allow the companies to understand their customers better and plan accordingly. It also supports integrations with various sources and ETL tools.
As a BI tool, Tableau provides many visualization options, and Line Chart is one such option. In this article, we will look at the steps to build a line chart in detail.
What is Tableau?
Tableau is one of the popular Business Intelligence tools currently in the market. It has the provision of analyzing enterprise data and then providing a detailed visualization. It is founded in 2003 in California but is now headquartered in Washington. Salesforce acquired Tableau in 2019, for about $15.9 Billion. Tableau helps organizations analyze the data and visualize it for better understanding and make proper data-driven decisions.
Tableau is an advanced analytics platform that visualizes complex data and simplifies it making it easier to understand and analyze. It also helps users to schedule jobs related to dashboards and reports, debug using information received during monitoring.
Key Features of Tableau
Some of the key features of Tableau are:
- Robust Security: Company’s data is protected by tableau. It ensures the use of proper authentication and provides proper data control capabilities.
- Mobile View: Tableau is also available on mobile platforms allowing the users to view reports from mobile devices.
- Predictive analytics: Machine Learning is used to analyze data and predict new trends. Tableau uses machine learning for analysis.
- Collaboration and Sharing: Tableau provides many options to share and comes out as easy collaboration software, and sends visualizations, spreadsheets, dashboards, and many more in real-time.
- Data Sources: Tableau accepts the data from various different sources and hence is very flexible in analyzing data.
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What is Tableau Line Chart?
The Tableau Line Chart is a visualization option where the two axes of a graph represent the dimension ( like time) and a measure ( like say sales of a company) are plotted together. This generates points known as Markers. By joining all the points together a line is formed which represents a trend or any useful insight.
Types of Tableau Line Charts
1. Simple Tableau Line Chart:
Where there is only one dimension and one measure plotted together
2. Multiple Tableau line chart:
Where there are multiple measures for a single dimension
3. Tableau Line chart with label:
After the line is plotted, the markers can be labeled
Tableau Line Chart Advantages
The advantages of Tableau Line Charts:
- It is the best method to represent changes that are spread over different time periods.
- It helps in understanding and predicting trends over historical data.
- Line charts are simple, easy to make and understand, at the same time very informative.
- Line charts can be optimized in such a way that they can represent even minor changes that is not possible in other charts.
- It also allows for easier comparison between different parameters since multiple lines can be plotted on the same axes.
Tableau Line Chart Disadvantages
Disadvantages of Line Chart in Tableau:
- Plotting multiple lines over the same axes makes it cluttered.
- If the data has many parameters, it becomes quite complex.
- It is only ideal for data with numerical values.
- Deciding consistent scales for axes is difficult and even a small error in them will lead to a distorted graph.
- If the numerical values are fractions and decimals the line chart is not very efficient.
How to build a Tableau line chart?
The following steps can be used to create a Tableau line chart. The Electronics Store sales dataset that is present in Tableau Desktop is used throughout the example, but you can use the dataset of your choice.
Step 1: Add the Measure and Dimension Field
- For this example, we will create a simple line chart where the dimension is Order Date and Measure is the Sales field. Drag and drop the Columns and Rows and a preliminary chart is created.
Step 2: Add a new Profit Measure
- Let’s create a multi-line graph from the simple graph created in the previous step.
- We need to add another measure. Add profits to the rows section.
- A new line chart is created instantly just below the first one.
Step 3: Drag SUM Measure
- We can merge two different columns to perform an action the same. We can drag SUM(profit) to the y-axis of the chart.
Step 4: Details of Measure Fields
- We will have a common y-axis for both the sales and profit values.
- We use the Measure value in the rows section to be able to remove separate values.
- To find details of Measure Value we can click on the Measure Value card-present beneath the marks card.
- To make the two lines different colored put the measured value into the color card.
Step 5: Manage the Appearance
- Now that we have both measures sharing a common y-axis, we can change the dimension.
- Here we are changing the order data from year to month, but it can change to weeks and days as well.
- The image shows we have data points for each month.
- Moving the cursor on data points shows the details of points such as a month, year, profit/sales in detail
- The color scheme can also be changed.
- Other properties like line opacity, chart borders, line markers, and many more can be changed.
- Also labels can be added by dragging the label card present on the marks card.
- As we know tableau uses machine learning, we can also add forecasting lines which are like predictions of coming years
Conclusion
Tableau is a leading data visualization tool with millions of users due to its easy-to-use nature and flexibility. That’s not it, Tableau provides various visualization options for the data. Tableau Line chart is one such option and in this article, we discussed the steps to create Tableau Line Chart along with its types.
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Share your experience of learning about the Tableau Line Chart in the comments section below.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How to create a line chart?
a) Connect to Your Data: Load your dataset into Tableau.
b) Drag Fields:
Drag the dimension (e.g., date) to the Columns shelf.
Drag the measure (e.g., sales) to the Rows shelf.
c) Choose Line Chart:Tableau automatically creates a line chart if your data is structured correctly. If not, click on the Show Me panel and select the line chart option.
d) Customize: Use Tableau’s formatting options to refine the appearance of your line chart.
2. How do you draw a line in Tableau dashboard?
a) Create a Line Chart
b) Add to Dashboard
c) Draw a Line
3. What is a limitation of line charts?
Include challenges with categorical data, overlapping lines, representation of complex relationships, effectiveness with small data sets, and potential for misleading trends.
Arsalan is a research analyst at Hevo and a data science enthusiast with over two years of experience in the field. He completed his B.tech in computer science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence and finds joy in sharing the knowledge acquired with data practitioners. His interest in data analysis and architecture drives him to write nearly a hundred articles on various topics related to the data industry.
