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How to build a Pareto Chart

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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What is a Pareto chart?

A pareto chart is a useful tool to analyse the contribution of causes to a result. In other words, we can analyse in a single chart for example how many products or categories contributed to my amount of sales. The pareto law states that usually 80% of your sales come from only 20% of your products. This saying can be used and analysed in a lot more ways than just sales.

Building a Pareto Chart in Tableau

On today’s blog I’ll show how to build a Pareto chart in Tableau and see if this rule is accurate. I will use my Sales as the Measure and the Product Name’s Dimension.

First step is to add your data to your worksheet.

Drag your Sales to rows and Product Name to columns.

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