Database Reference
In-Depth Information
▪ How are we doing compared to where we should be right now if we want to hit our
monthly goal?
These are fundamental questions in business, politics, world development, and even personal
life. At their core, they are comparisons of proportion or percent, and it's fairly easy to see
how charts like the ones shown in this chapter can be used to answer these types of ques-
tions. Actual-to-target is a special type of part-to-whole and current-to-historical.
NOTE
By definition, actual-to-target isn't bound by 1 or 100%, because we can always exceed
our goals and targets. In the case of quotas, exceeding the target would be welcomed,
while in the case of budgets, it would not.
Imagine a waterfall chart showing how spending in a fiscal year breaks down into different
departments or categories. Adding a budget reference line would be an easy way to see if the
expenditures were more or less than what was allocated.
Or if a sales department wanted to show how its reps were performing relative to plan, they
could create a bullet graph where the blue bars represented actuals for each rep and the lines
and bands represented quotas.
Summary
Proportions and percentages are ubiquitous, and in this chapter, we've seen how to commu-
nicate them well, as well as the steps involved to create effective chart types in Tableau.
We've also considered table calculations in greater detail, and started using reference lines
and quick filters. We introduced the bullet chart, and showed how to create the waterfall
chart.
In the next chapter, we'll consider “measures of central tendency”: mean and median.
