Author: Ajay CB
What is Tableau?
Tableau is a business intelligence (BI) tool widely used in the industry for data visualization to help organizations understand their data and make better business decisions.
What is a Pyramid chart?
A Pyramid chart is a type of viz that we can create in Tableau. The name "Pyramid" was given because the visualization would look similar to a Pyramid. In many situations, we are in need to display connected stages in the business process, etc. we want to see how impactful the numbers are, and the easiest way to compare those is by using a Pyramid chart and also in a few scenarios, it can be used as an alternative for a pie chart.
There are many custom charts we can make in Tableau that are not available by default, one of which is the Pyramid chart. This is very simple to make and can be done in just a few clicks. Let's see how this is done.
There are a lot of custom charts that are not available by default in Tableau, but we can create them with a few steps easily! Let's see how it is done.
Step 1: Open Tableau. For this demonstration, I’m using the sample superstore data set. We are going to display the profit per region and sort it by ascending. (I had filtered out the nulls, and that's why there is a filter on the filters pane)
Step 2: Create a calculated field. Since we are working with profit, create a calculated field with the data as - [profit] as given below
Step 3: Now drag and drop that calculated field in front of the sum(Profit) in columns. Similar to the picture attached below.
Step 4: Add regions to color in the marks card, Right-click the axis below, and uncheck the show header button. And remove the grid lines, zero lines, and column dividers from the formatting page and click the entire view on the page to fit on top, and voila, you are done!
Conclusion
Custom charts are really effective since it creates a lot of creativity in visualization, and when it comes to Pyramid chart, they can be used effectively to display connected stages and to compare the stages.