Tableau Tutorials for Beginners — Segment 7

Hello friends! Hope you have already read and enjoyed Segment 6 of this tutorial. In case you have not yet, please take out 10 minutes of your valuable time to understand the concepts explained in Segment 6.

You can access it at this link ( Tableau Tutorials for Beginners — Segment 6).

In today’s article, we will learn about the below concept:

• Reference Line in a chart
• Independent Axis creation

Reference Line in a chart: There can be scenarios where we want to depict a certain value ( e.g. Average ) in a chart in form of a constant line. The reference line option in Tableau helps us to achieve that. Let us see how

Assume that in the following chart, I want to show the Average value as a constant line.

To add a Reference line, right-click on the Y-Axis and click Add Reference Line

In the pop-up window that comes up, select the Average option

Once this is done, the average line will appear in the chart as below:

You can even define your custom value as the reference line as below:

Independent Axis creation: You may have created a visualization where there is more than one chart in your visualization having a common X-Axis but varying Y-Axis. Let us see an example first:

If you see the Y-Axis range, the range of Sales for all the Sub Category values is the same, while in actual the range values are different for each Sub Category. Due to the same range of Y-Axis, the lines do not reflect the correct trend visually. The option to solve this problem is to use the option of Independent Axis. Let us see how to do it

Right-click on the Y-Axis and do Edit Axis:

In the pop-up window that comes, select the option of “Independent Axis”

Now see the updated visualization