Week 35: Superstore Small Multiples

We’re wrapping up our month of Community submissions with a workout submitted by Zen Master Neil Richards.  A great way to end an awesome month facilitated by so many members of the Workout Wednesday community.  We’ve definitely been inspired and challenged by your contributions and impressed with the support you’ve given to those completing your workout.

So without further ado – here’s this week’s brief and background from Neil:

This week’s workout is about recreating a small multiple version of a 2×2 quadrant chart. There may be limited uses for such a chart but I’m a great fan of small multiple charts for visual horizon scanning to compare and contrast patterns in data over dimensions. Since the superstore dataset has 49 states included (no Alaska or Hawaii, but District of Columbia is included), we have a perfect dataset for a 7×7 grid.

I recently created an example of such a chart in a submission for #VizForSocialGood which can be seen here. Your challenge this week is to recreate a similar chart using the (US) Superstore dataset which is supplied with every Tableau installation. We will look at profit ratio across 4 category types (splitting the Technology category into Phones and Other Tech) and display as four proportionally sized squares. We will then highlight the category with the highest profit ratio using the colour of the state’s region. You can see the finished viz below – further explanation is given in the top section.

Requirements:

• Dashboard size: 1000 x 1300 – 2 sheets
• Create a view looking at profit across 4 categories
• Split out phones vs. other tech
• Ensure the category with the highest profit is highlighted with color
• Color for the highlight should match the state’s region
• Create a custom legend for the upper right with a larger version of the overall chart
• Ensure negative profit ratio is expressed as zero

Data from this week comes from the Saved Data Source in Tableau 2018 (Sample – Superstore), download here if needed.

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtag #WorkoutWednesday and tag @theneilrichards,  @AnnUJackson, @LukeStanke, and @RodyZakovich.  (Tag @VizWizBI if you have space, he would love to see your work too!)

Also, don’t forget to track your progress using this Workout Wednesday form.