How to Make Charts in Tableau
Building charts in Tableau is a foundational skill for turning rows of data into meaningful business insights. Instead of combing through spreadsheets, you can create dynamic, interactive visuals that tell a clear story. This guide will walk you through the essential steps for creating a few of the most common and useful charts in Tableau, so you can start visualizing your data right away.
First, Understand the Tableau Workspace
Tableau's drag-and-drop interface is what makes it so intuitive. Before building your first chart, it's helpful to get familiar with a few key areas. When you connect a data source, you'll primarily work with these components:
The Data Pane (left side): This is where you’ll find all the fields from your dataset. Tableau automatically categorizes them into Dimensions and Measures.
Dimensions: These are your categorical or qualitative fields. Think of them as the "what," "who," or "when" in your data. Examples include things like Customer Name, Product Category, or Order Date. They are typically blue pills.
Measures: These are your numerical or quantitative fields - the things you can count, sum, or average. Examples include Sales, Profit, or Quantity. They are typically green pills.
Shelves (top and center): This is where the magic happens. You drag fields from the Data Pane onto these shelves to build your visualization. The most important ones are:
Columns Shelf: Fields placed here create the columns of your chart.
Rows Shelf: Fields placed here create the rows of your chart.
The Marks Card (center): This powerful little box lets you control the visual properties of your chart. You can drop fields here to adjust the Color, Size, Shape, Label, and Tooltip of your data points.
Filters Shelf (center): Drag fields here to include or exclude specific data from your view, allowing you to narrow your focus.
Show Me (top-right): This tool provides recommendations for chart types based on the fields you’ve selected. It’s a great way to explore possibilities when you're starting out.
The core concept is simple: drag your Dimensions (what you want to slice your data by) and your Measures (what you want to calculate) onto the Columns and Rows shelves, and Tableau does the rest.
Connecting to Your Data
Before you can make a chart, you need some data. For beginners, using a simple Excel file or a CSV is the easiest way to start. When you first open Tableau, you'll see a blue "Connect" pane on the left.
Under "To a File," select the appropriate format (e.g., "Microsoft Excel").
Navigate to your file and click "Open."
Tableau will bring you to the Data Source screen. If your Excel file has multiple tabs, you can drag the one you want to analyze onto the main canvas.
Once you're happy with the data loaded, click on the "Sheet 1" tab at the bottom to go to your worksheet and start building.
How to Make a Bar Chart
The bar chart is the workhorse of data visualization, perfect for comparing values across different categories. Let's say you want to visualize total sales for each product category.
Step 1: Drag Your Dimension to Columns. Find the dimension you want to use for your categories. In our example, this would be Category. Drag the 'Category' pill from the Data Pane and drop it onto the Columns shelf. You'll see column headers appear for each category in your data (e.g., "Furniture," "Office Supplies," "Technology").
Step 2: Drag Your Measure to Rows. Next, find the measure you want to compare - in this case, Sales. Drag the 'Sales' pill from the Data Pane and drop it onto the Rows shelf.
And that’s it! Tableau will automatically recognize that you're comparing a measure across different categories and generate a vertical bar chart. You should now see a bar for each product category, with its height representing the total sum of sales.
Adding Extra Detail with Color
To add more depth, you can break down each bar by another dimension. For example, let's see how sales in each category are divided by customer segment.
Step 3 (Optional): Add a Dimension to Color. Find the Segment dimension and drag it onto the Color mark in the Marks Card. Your bars will now split into different colored sections, representing each customer segment.
How to Make a Line Chart
Line charts are ideal for tracking a measure over time. Let's see how our company's profit has changed month over month.
Step 1: Drag Your Date to Columns. Find your date dimension, which is likely called Order Date. Drag it onto the Columns shelf. Tableau is smart about dates and will probably default to showing you "YEAR(Order Date)."
Step 2: Drag Your Measure to Rows. Take your measure - this time, Profit - and drag it to the Rows shelf. Tableau will generate a line chart showing total profit for each year.
Step 3: Adjust the Date Granularity. A yearly view might be too high-level. To change this, right-click on the "YEAR(Order Date)" pill in the Columns shelf. You can change it to "Quarter," "Month," "Week," or "Day." Choose "Month" to see the trend in more detail.
You now have a line chart that shows the flow of profit over time, making it easy to spot trends, seasonality, and spikes or dips.
How to Make a Pie Chart
While pie charts should be used carefully (they become hard to read with too many slices), they are effective at showing proportional breakdowns of a whole. Let's visualize what percentage of our total sales comes from each shipping mode.
Step 1: Change the Mark Type. In the Marks Card, there's a dropdown menu that is likely set to "Automatic." Click it and select "Pie."
Step 2: Drag a Dimension to Color. Find the dimension defining your slices - for us, that’s Ship Mode. Drag it onto the Color mark. You'll now see a color key for "First Class," "Same Day," etc.
Step 3: Drag a Measure to Angle. To size the different pie slices, you need to tell Tableau which measure to use. Drag Sales onto the Angle mark. The pie chart will instantly take shape, with each slice's angle proportional to its share of total sales.
Step 4: Add Labels (Recommended). To make it easier to read, drag both Ship Mode and Sales onto the Label mark in the Marks Card. Now, each slice will show its name and value.
How to Make a Scatter Plot
Scatter plots are perfect for identifying the relationship between two different measures. For instance, are higher sales always associated with higher profits? Sometimes big sales come with big costs!
Step 1: Drag Your First Measure to Columns. Let's see if there's a correlation. Drag Sales onto the Columns shelf.
Step 2: Drag Your Second Measure to Rows. Now, drag Profit onto the Rows shelf. Right now, you’ll probably only see one single dot on your chart. That’s because Tableau has aggregated all your data into one point - the grand total of sales and the grand total of profit.
Step 3: Disaggregate Your Data. To see individual data points, you need to add a level of detail. Find a dimension like Customer Name or Order ID and drag it to the Detail mark on the Marks Card.
Suddenly, that one dot will burst into hundreds or thousands of smaller dots, with each dot representing a single customer (or order). You can now look for patterns. Do the dots cluster in a line going from bottom-left to top-right (positive correlation)? Or are they scattered all over the place (no correlation)? Adding Category to the Color mark can reveal even more insights here.
Final Thoughts
Learning to create bar, line, pie, and scatter plots is the first major step in becoming proficient with Tableau. By understanding how to combine different dimensions and measures on your shelves, you can begin to explore almost any dataset and uncover the stories hidden within it.
While mastering a powerful tool like Tableau is an incredibly valuable skill, it does come with a significant learning curve. Sometimes, you just need a quick answer without digging through menus and learning a new piece of software. That’s why we built Graphed . We wanted to eliminate the friction between your question and your data. Instead of building charts manually, you can just ask in plain English - like "show me sales by category as a bar chart" - and get a live, interactive visualization in seconds, freeing you up to focus on strategy, not just report building.