Using Custom Shapes and Polygons to draw anything from Directed Graphs to Infographics in Tableau

Custom shapes are great for simplifying the association between marks and what they represent so the viewers can enjoy the visualization without having to constantly check the legend to remind themselves what they’re looking at.  But you can see them being used for various purposes in the wild such as navigation/filter controls in dashboards. Custom polygons provide another great way to draw custom shapes in Tableau although they are almost exclusively used in maps by most.

In this blog post, I will be sharing some rather unusual example use cases for both of these mark types about which I got questions about from many Tableau users via the blog or in person conversations at this year’s Tableau conference.

Before we go on any further, please keep in mind that large and/or asymmetrical shapes can negatively affect the accurate readability of your visualizations since their center (which is where the value on the axis corresponds) may be difficult to pinpoint AND most of the data below (while they may look prettier this way) can be more accurately depicted with basic chart types like the good old bar chart. For most of these examples I relied on the Sample – Superstore dataset even though the titles of the visualizations may say otherwise.  All of these visualizations are published on Tableau public for you to download and explore. You can also find information as comments inside the calculated fields that I created.

Let’s start with using marks to create the customized bar chart you see below.

In simple bar chart form this would look like the following:

Now, how do you make this imaginary Sales data look like a chart that shows # births annually? By making the bars look like little kids holding hands, of course. : )

The core piece is the calculation that generates the evenly spaced marks. In this case I divided SUM(Sales) for each region in Superstore dataset into chunks of 5000 until we span the total amount.

This gets you most of the way and you can actually stop at this point if you don’t care about any more precision than increments of 5000. But what happens if you want to be a bit more precise? By using another calculation to show different marks for fractions of 5000…

In this case, my dataset contained enough rows to accommodate all the marks I needed for my visualization. But what if it didn’t? The next example answers this question, as well as showing a different chart type.

Stacked icons are commonly used when author of the visualization isn’t too worried about exactness conveyed by the chart. For example our next pictogram shows tanks in Bacteria and Osterlich armies. I can clearly see Bacteria has the superior army. The difference is large enough that even a coarse visualization like this gets the point across. If I cared to count the tanks in the viz and looked up the population, I could have even found out that it corresponds to 0.46 tanks per capita! : ) 

In this case since my dataset had fewer rows than the marks shown on the viz, I had to generate rows. To achieve this I used one of the densification tricks I showed earlier in my Coxcomb chart blog post.  You can see the custom SQL query below which adds a new row for each existing row with the value for Sales set to 0.

After doing this, I can right click on my Sales column and select “Create Bins”. I need to set the bin size to the quantity my each icon will represent. In the sample workbook, I created bins of 10,000 (icon says 10^6 tanks but underlying data is still aggregated Superstore). Now if I look at my data, this is what I see (0 rows are highlighted).

There are really two values in my dataset for each Market. But if I drag Sales (bin) into rows or columns shelf, now I can select “Show Missing Values” from pill context menu to tell Tableau also to show me the buckets that contain no data. Bins are normally used to generate histograms and this setting is intended to show/hide empty bins in the histogram. To show me the empty bins, Tableau creates new rows for me. This way my 2 rows for Bacteria become 27 rows which means now I can show 27 marks.

Same method can be used with multiple dimensions as well. The following example demonstrates this using Region and Product Type dimensions.

In this case, the custom SQL query looks slightly different but rest of the process is the same.

You can do a lot more with custom marks if you are adventurous and prefer prioritizing visually interesting charts at the expense of readability and accuracy. For example you can use a custom mark like a stencil as shown below.

In this visualization, marks are overlaid on top of a stacked bar chart. Custom mark (the beer glass) has a hollow center (transparent PNG) and is on the secondary axis where the bottom of the glass is fixed at 0 to achieve the effect.  White, yellow color pattern is used in stacked bar chart to resemble beer and foam. This chart is visually interesting but especially considering lack of axis and the fact that it is unclear whether the quantity is associated with the height or area, it is not easy to interpret.

You can take it even further and use images themselves to mimic bar charts as shown in the following example.

I hope that’s enough for the infographics. How about something more exciting, such as directed graphs? You could create a graph in Tableau using a dual axis chart combining lines and circles. But how do you indicate direction?

The first tab in the Tableau public visualization linked via the image above shows how to achieve this using custom marks. This is done by creating 360 custom marks to cover every 1 degree rotation of arrow and first vertex. A calculated field determines the angle for each edge which is used to decide which rotated arrow to display. Note that since the graph can be dynamic, the domain of the field on marks card (angles) may also change. This may lead to changes in what mark is used for what angle. To avoid this, if you look at the dataset associated with this example you will notice that the complete domain (of all possible angles) is added to provide padding but then “pseudo-filtered out” using Pages shelf so these rows don’t have any effect on the visualization itself.

An even more interesting way to do this to use the polygon mark type and custom render the arrows. This example uses the binning technique we discussed earlier to generate rows to accommodate each arrow (each arrow is made up of 8 points).

XFirstStep and YFirstStep fields draw the arrow and scale it based on the distance between points it will connect. Then rotatedX and rotatedY fields take the arrow and rotate it based on the angle between the two points. Since the arrows are rendered as polygons, they could be modified on the fly. I took it one step further and even parameterized the arrow so you can design your custom arrow! Just use the “Design your arrow” tab : )  Below is an example of different arrows you can create…

Enjoy!