Histogram chart in Tableau
A histogram is a chart that represents the accurate distribution of numerical data. A histogram represents the actual frequencies of values of a variable bucketed into ranges. The histogram may look similar to a bar chart, but it groups the values into continuous ranges hile a bar chart is a plot of categorical variables. It is used for representing continuous data, where the bins indicate ranges of data. Each bar in histogram serves the height of the number of values present in that range.
A histogram can be created by taking one measure with zero or more dimension. It also creates an additional bin field for the measure used in creating a histogram.
Creating a Simple Histogram
To create a simple Histogram, the following are the steps:
- Open the Tableau Desktop and connect to your data source.
- Drag and drop the Measure named Quantity to the Rows shelf.
- From the Show Me tab, select the Histogram chart.
- The following diagram shows the histogram chart created and you will also notice Quantity measure that has been automatically added to the column shelf. Tableau buckets the quantity into values ranging from 0 to 4811 which are divided into 12 bins.
Creating a Histogram with Dimension
In Tableau, we can also add Dimensions to the Measures the generate histograms. Following the steps of the above example, and add the Dimension (here we have taken direction) to the color Shelf under Marks Card. This creates the following stacked histogram where each bar also includes the visualization for a different direction.
