Teaser Week - Build Your Best Bar Chart

I’m so excited to share my first blog post for our new Tableau Community Project, Back 2 Viz Basics (#B2VB). I am beyond thankful for the amount of feedback, participation, and support during the Teaser Week. There were over 110 submissions, with quite a few coming from first-time Tableau Public users!

I cannot thank the Tableau Community enough. If you are unfamiliar with Back 2 Viz Basics, you can learn more about the project and how to participate here

So, what happened in our Teaser Week? Participants were tasked with building their best bar chart given a Thanksgiving themed data set. The data consisted of one dimension and two measures: Value and Percent. 

Bar charts are my favorite type of charts. They are easy to interpret and answer the question of “how many” in the simplest of ways. They can be horizontal or vertical and show quantitative comparisons across one to many categories. 

In Tableau, the options are endless for formatting your bar chart…and I really mean endless. There we’re so many different types of bar charts submitted for the Teaser Week: Rounded bars, outlined bars, lollipop bars, progress bars, a Cleveland Dot plot, and even a radial bar chart. I love revisiting Jerffrey Shaffer’s Bar Hopping viz for when I need some inspiration on different types of bar charts. 

Now, let’s take a look at some of my favorites.

The first submission that comes to mind is from Autumn Battani. She shows us four different styles that all represent the data correctly, but might have a particular setback when it comes to sizing or labeling. I love how Autumn share’s her thoughts on each and why one might be better than another to use. Which is your favorite?

Another submission that I really enjoyed comes from Lindsay Betzendahl. I absolutely love the look of rounded bar charts. They have such a modern look to them and can really elevate a dashboard if used properly. Lindsay’s viz sparked a lot of interest, so she put together a great blog post on her design process and how to build rounded bar charts. You can read more about her viz here.   

Finally, I want to highlight my favorite style of bar charts that I saw. I’m not sure if it's the new craze, but quite a few people designed progress bars. These are bar charts that have a thin line extending from the middle of the bar to the right-hand side of the viz. At the end, all the labels are aligned vertically. I find this type of bar chart to be super crisp and clean. We can visually see the length of the bars and which value is greater than the next, but we can also see each label cleanly and in an organized way. These have turned out to be my favorite type of bar chart.

Here are a few more submissions I’d like to highlight: 

Renz Gaddi - I love this. I feel like it could be a print out for the dinner table next year! 

Kevin Flerlage - super clean progress bar with a middle line

Deborah Simmonds - I love the highlighting feature based on the user’s selection

Other Favorites

John Whitmer

And finally, Luke Abraham. I’ll never forget those tooltips.

I wish I could highlight every participant’s viz here. Hats off to everyone who submitted a visualization for the Teaser Week. Back 2 Viz Basics will be returning in the New Year with a FULL YEAR of challenges! 

Here’s to keeping it simple and getting ~back to basics~ in 2022!

Eric Balash