How to Create a Dual and Synchronized Axis Chart in Tableau

Recently, I returned from a 2 day Advanced Tableau Course hosted here in Vancouver. One of the reasons I love Tableau is the breadth of training knowledge that comes along with the software. Having previously attended the fundamentals course, I appreciate the ability to meet people from many different sectors all coming together to learn more about this powerful BI tool.

As I usually do when I come back from conferences or training sessions I am all excited to share what I learned with anyone who will listen.

Since here you are reading my blog post I thought I would share a quick but powerful tip for visualization in Tableau.

Using Multiple Measures in a View

One of the best ways to show year over year data when comparing two measures is to do a combined axis chart in Tableau.

Say we wanted to see our Sum of Profit and Sum of Sales from 2009–2013.

We start off by dragging our Dimension (in this case order date) to the columns tab and drag our measure (Profit) to the rows column. Because I want to see this date by month, I right click on the order date pill and change to continuous month.

Great! We have a nice line chart already set up here. If you would like to Change the type of the chart to say, a bar, click on the drop down on the marks card and select ‘bar’.

For now, I am happy with the line. Next, I want to see our sales over the same time frame on the same chart.

So there are two ways to do this…

First is to drag the Sales measure next to Profit. Tableau will automatically create two graphs for you, but again because I am interested in comparing them together so I am going to combine the two charts.

I do this by right clicking on my sales pill and selecting “Dual Axis”

The second way to do this is to drag our Sales measure all the way to the right of the chart until you see the mouse create a ruler effect. Once the hover has produced the ruler effect drop the measure and Tableau will combine your two charts.

Voila!

Oh we are getting close and you can feel it. However, if you notice our axis for Sales and Profits have different amounts and because I want to analyze based on the same amount I need the axis to be synchronized.

To do this, you can right click on either of the axis and simply select Synchronize axis.

Wonderful! Now we have our dual axis chart and synchronized our axis for our quick analysis.

Pretty simple stuff right? Maybe you want to take this further and add a few more measures to this chart.

To do this we simply repeat the above steps but this time we use our “Measure Values” green pill. For those who don’t know “Measure Values” will drag in all your measures. So again, I drag this pill over to the far right until I see the ruler and drop. Or I right click and click create dual axis. Because I am dragging in new measures, I have to repeat the process of right clicking and synchronizing the axis.

Out of the measure values on the marks card I drag off the values that I don’t need on my chart.

For the sake of this demo I just want to see Profit, Sales and Unit Price.

There you have it! You have now successfully created a chart with a single axis with multiple measures.

High fives for being a data rockstar!

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Happy Vizing!