Hey everyone! It’s been a while…in today’s blog, I want to share with you an interesting type of chart that I learned from Andy Kriebel – the global head coach of The Data School, called jittered bar chart. If you’re looking for something different and cool, but still representing good visualisation like bar chart, you might want to try creating this one.
In this example, I used the Super Store dataset, any version would be fine. Our goal is to look at the sales of customers over the years, by quarter. Let’s do it!
First, drag Order Date to Columns, click the little “+” next to Year to expand it to Quarter. Double click on Rows and type in INDEX(). This is to create an index for every record in each quarter.
Change type of chart to circle. Drag Customer Name to Detail. Double click on Columns and type in AVG(RANDOM()).
We have one dot for every customer as shown below
Drag Sales to Size. From here, you will see the size of the dot varies according to the amount of sales that each customer made.
Edit Table Calculation of INDEX(). Untick Year of Order Date and Quarter of Order Date, tick on Customer Name instead. This means the calculation will redo every new quarter and new year.
By now, you have created a jittered bar chart. If you want to have different colours for different years, simply drag Order Date to Color card and you will get the below visual.
This type of bar chart provides a bit more insights, especially pointing out the significant individuals who made big sales within an overall sales of each quarter. I remembered having so many classic bar charts on my application to The Data School and was looking for some alternatives, I wish I knew this back then (there’s nothing wrong with bar chart, I was just wanting to have something different to showcase my skills at the time haha).
I hope you find my blog useful!