Wanna see how I created the Sankey Chart step by step? Check out my video here:
The other day I was hunting for anything new to try out in Tableau and I landed on the Tableau Exchange. This is similar to the Snowflake Marketplace, in a way: a platform where vendors can share (or sell) features to improve the product. Unlike the Snowflake Marketplace though, the Tableau Exchange does not contain applications, but extensions. These can be used on the online instances of Tableau, thus on Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server or Tableau Public. Not all extensions are usable in all Tableau instances, and in fact only one of them is currently available for Tableau Public: the Sankey Chart extension.
I had some fun trying it out, which resulted in the workbook below:
This took very little time, especially if compared to the “old” way of creating Sankey charts. I can now comfortably say that a basic Sankey chart can be created in five minutes with this extension.
It does have some limitations:
- tooltips are the same for all columns in the chart, even this doesn’t really makes sense practically;
- it is not possible to modify the color of the values, so it is not possible to have the same value keep the same color across columns;
- And it is only possible to sort the first column on the left: the other columns still have the sorting option, but it just doesn’t work.
Overall I am quite happy with my end result, and a bit disappointed in the limited customization options.
Looking forward to having more extensions available to create beautiful charts in few minutes!
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