Author: Ajay CB
Introduction
What is Tableau?
Tableau is a business intelligence (BI) tool used to make visualizations with data and to make visually intelligent dashboards and solutions to make better business decisions.
What is a lollipop chart?
A lollipop is a type of visualization chart in BI tools that actually looks like a lollipop. In many situations, we are in need to find alternatives for Bar chart /Gantt chart/Side-by-side bar chart to make the dashboard more visually appealing and easier to understand. That's where we can use a lollipop chart.
There are many custom charts we can make in Tableau that are not available by default, one of which is the Lollipop chart. This is very simple to make and can be done in just a very few clicks. Let's see how this is done.
Step 1: Open Tableau, for this example I am going to use the sample superstore data set. We will view the sales for every segment in the data set.
Step 2: Create a secondary axis for the sum of sales by dragging it from the fields to the rows area on top.
Step 3: On the marks card, you can see there exists 2 sum of the sales. Click on the first one and change the viz from automatic to bar.
Step 4: On the marks card, Click on the second sum of sales and change the viz from automatic to Circle.
Step 5: Now, click on the arrow button on the second sum of sales in the rows bar on top and click on the dual axis.
Step 6: You will get something like this.
Step 7: Now click on the sum of sales from the marks card you had given as a bar and reduce its size by clicking on the size button from the marks card.
Step 8: Right-click on the right axis and clear the show header so you can only see a single axis.
Step 9: Voila! We have made a lollipop chart in just minutes, so after formatting, we can make it look amazing like this.
Conclusion
A lollipop chart can be used as a replacement for Gantt charts/Side by side charts for better visualization in your future projects. Similarly to this, there are a lot of custom charts that can be created in Tableau. Custom charts make your visualization even more interesting!
References
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YCawaW9PF8