This blog post will be short and sweet. First off, huge shout out to Hesham Eissa for winning the latest #IronViz feeder. Your viz was wonderful in so many aspects, although the element that caught me eye right off the bat was the chart type used at the very beginning of the dashboard. I am calling this a filled bar chart (???) for the purpose of this blog.

If you haven’t already, check out the viz at the link below…

https://public.tableau.com/profile/hesham3827#!/vizhome/TheGlobalJourneyofRefugees/TheGlobalJourneyofRefugees

I really like the cleanliness and simplicity of the chart and I think it has a lot of potential for work use cases. Being so intrigued, I downloaded the Tableau workbook and sought to understand how Hesham made the chart. At first I was hoping for a single sheet but I saw that it was floating elements to obtain the labeling. During a layover in DTW I decided to try and make it one sheet. Here is my (attempted) solution. I used a mock data set from a past project showing demographics of a local school district.

Here is the inside of my dashboard. Essentially I created a line chart using Measure Values of % of Total and then Avg(0) to get the line stretching from 0 to the % of Total. I then made a dual axis with the % of Total in order to get a second layer in which to be able to get the dual labels to show up (in this case Race and % of Total).

I added a Avg(0) row to the data to get the axis centered on 0. I then made the Zero Lines very thick to get the rest of the light gray bars to show up. Once this was in place I had the colored lines representing race and the light gray lines extending to fill out the rest of the filled line chart.

To get the labeling I dragged the Race field under the Measure Values marks card and chose Line Ends option, checking the Label start of line option. Under the % of Total marks card I dragged a discrete pill of the % of Total to text and then chose the Label end of line option under Line Ends.

Go to the link below to check out the viz live.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/spencer.baucke#!/vizhome/FilledBarChartExample/FilledBarChartExample

Tableau community, help me out here. Is this the best way to make this chart in one sheet? Does anyone else have any hacks on this?

The one issues I was having is that if you make the chart too short then the text start to overlap the bar chart. Other than that, I think its a pretty good imitation of the one from Hesham’s viz. But this is another reason why #IronViz is so awesome though, it inspires a lot of creativity and different chart types that get my creative juices flowing.

Any way, I wrote this sitting at some overpriced food place at LaGuardia (NYC), so forgive me the typos and the brevity. Please let me know your thoughts! Email me at spencer.baucke@gmail.com or DM me at https://twitter.com/JSBaucke!