Tag: tableau grid lines

  • Tableau Quick Tip #4 – Drop Lines

    Call out positions of selected data points in your Tableau view using Drop Lines

    Ruler Macro - Photographer 2nd_Order_Effect (flickr.com)

    I am barely
    using gridlines on my charts. In fact I didn’t even know that Tableau Software has an option to show and format gridlines. Hence I
    started the original introduction to this post as follows:

    Unlike Microsoft
    Excel,
    Tableau Software does not provide an option to display gridlines on
    charts. Tableau allows you to define so called row and column dividers, but
    only for categorical data, i.e. dimensions.

    This statement
    is totally wrong: Tableau offers gridlines (Format | Lines | Grid Lines) and
    Rich was kind enough to correct this in the first comment to this post. Thanks
    Rich. My fault. I apologize for the confusion.

    But still:
    gridlines are very often nothing else than chart junk as Stephen Few points out
    in this excellent article: Grid Lines in Graphs are Rarely
    Useful
    . Tableau has something way
    more useful than gridlines: the interactive Drop Line.

    Today’s short Tableau Quick Tip #4 introduces this extremely helpful interactive feature of Tableau.

    (more…)