2022 Week 12: Can you create a jittered boxplot?

Last week a colleague reached out for help creating a boxplot to look at age distribution for different subscription methods, and my first thought was, “I know how to do that, but I don’t remember how to do that.” So I went back to find one I had made previously, and we were able to figure it out, as it was fairly simple. Boxplots can be simple to build, if you know where to put things. So this week we’ll practice building a boxplot. 

Early in my Tableau journey, I came across some blog posts (here and here) from a couple Tableau legends, Jeffrey Shaffer and Steve Wexler (2 of the 3 authors of the Big Book of Dashboards), talking about “jitter.” Steve actually has 4 separate blog posts about jitterplots, and they’re all fantastic. But there is definitely something to seeing the distribution spread out in addition to a boxplot, instead of having a bunch of dots stacked on top of each other in a single column. So this week we’re more specifically practicing a jittered boxplot.

I wanted to focus on the fundamentals, so I didn’t want a huge dataset. Since Major League Baseball is back this week, I decided to look at age distribution by team for 2021 (with a little bonus of whether teams made the playoffs or not).