#Box and whisker plot examples software#

Notice that the strip of dots within “Corporate” is much wider than the other segments because there were more orders within “Corporate” than there are in the other segments. Consider the example below where we show a distribution of Superstore Sales across different customer segments.įigure 6 – Shortcomings of using INDEX() by itself. It turns out that for this particular example INDEX() by itself works because there is an equal distribution of IDs across each of the age bins.

I put this on the Columns shelf and compute using ID, as shown here.įigure 5 – First attempt using Tableau’s INDEX() function To “jitter” the marks I create a calculated field called “Index” that uses Tableau’s INDEX() function. Of course, I can still superimpose the box plot, as shown here.įigure 4 - Salary Distribution by Age Bins with the marks “jittered” and box plot overlay Getting Jitters Using INDEX() This gives me a much better feel for the data as I can how the thousands of marks cluster. Here’s the original chart, but with the marks “jittered” using a modified version of Tableau’s built-in INDEX() function.įigure 3 - Salary Distribution by Age Bins with the marks “jittered” This is definitely an improvement, but I really don’t “feel” the data as I can’t see how the dots are distributed they are all stacked on top of each other. To see percentiles and outliers we can use Tableau’s Show Me feature and click the Box-and-Whisker Plot button.įigure 2 - Salary Distribution by Age Bins with Box and Whisker Overlay Salary and Age Bins – Box and Whisker Plot We also can’t tell that there are in fact thousands of dots in the visualization as so many marks are sitting on top of each other. While we can see that the top salaries are enjoyed by people in their 50s, there’s nothing that gives us concrete percentiles nor shows us where the outliers are. Salary and Age Bins – DefaultĬonsider the following pre-Tableau 8.1 salary chart that shows how salaries are distributed across age bins.įigure 1 - Default Salary Distribution by Age Bins Note: Interactive dashboards that illustrate jittering techniques may be found at the end of this blog post. Let’s see how a box and whisker plot compares with jittering using a simple example. Indeed, this “jittering” capability was the BIG discovery for me in 2013. While I appreciate the new functionality, this chart type doesn’t “sing” to me the as much as jittering does.

#Box and whisker plot examples software#

One of the new features in Tableau 8.1 that Tableau Software is trumpeting quite a bit is one-click Box and Whisker Plot generation.