Practical Tableau

Chapter 41. Introducing Pace Charts in Tableau

Pace charts are an alternative bullet graph design that normalize progress to goal visualizations across KPIs, even if the KPIs have different data formats, scales, and/or seasonal trends. They are useful for providing an “apples to apples” pace to goal comparison in businesses that have KPIs that span different categories such as revenue, social media followers, attendance, and so on.

With KPIs such as revenue, social media followers, and attendance, not only are the metrics in different formats, but they are often on very different scales and have varying seasonality. For example, you may gain social media followers throughout an entire year, but if you are an NFL team, your attendance won’t start until August. Further, your growth on social media might be on a scale of thousands, while revenue may be on a scale of millions.

Pace charts normalize KPIs by comparing them all on an axis that ends at 100% (the goal). In addition to showing how much progress each KPI has made toward the goal, a linear or seasonal pace is displayed to illustrate whether progress to goal is on pace to reach goal. To enhance the illustration, the marks can be colored to show how current progress to goal for each respective KPI compares to its pace to goal.

To illustrate how to create a pace chart in Tableau, I will start by re-creating this pace chart showing a variety of KPIs that are on a linear pace (i.e., they should all be at the same progress to goal ...