How to make Bump Chart in Tableau

In today’s blog, we will learn about Bump Chart in Tableau. A Bump chart is used to visualize changes in rank over a period of time. Bump chart have very simple use and application in Tableau:

For this chart, I have used the world economic freedom data shared for #makeovermonday on http://www.makeovermonday.co.uk/data/ for last week makeover.

Step 1: Import the world economic freedom data into Tableau which I transformed into following format:

Step 2: Create a calculated field called rank on the score field using rank() function of Tableau:

Step 3: Drag Year (convert the Year to date format) to column shelf (I filtered the year from 2006 to 2015) and convert Year into discrete form and drag rank twice into rows. Then drag Index type column into filter and filter for “overall” Type and drag countries column into colors under marktype.

Step 4: For both the rank, change the calculation type by clicking on compute by and selecting countries and change the graph type to dual axis and use synchronise axis to have axis in sync

Step 5: Reverse the axis using edit axis option and change the graph type from automatic to circle for second Rank column:

Step 6: I set the filter for countries as well to display top 10 ranks and few changes in formatting then it will look like below:

That’s it our bump chart is ready

Final output is shared on Tableau public path here

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Thanks 🙂