Learn how to create butterfly charts in Tableau to visualize comparative data, such as gender or regional differences, using side-by-side bar charts. This article walks through building a basic butterfly chart and customizing it with labels, colors, and formatting for clearer presentation.
Key Insights
- Butterfly charts display two sets of related but opposing data side by side, and are useful for comparisons like male versus female or regional sales data.
- Creating a butterfly chart in Tableau requires manual adjustments, including swapping rows and columns, reversing the axis on one side, and customizing labels and colors for clarity.
- Noble Desktop demonstrates how to build simple, intermediate, and advanced butterfly charts by organizing data in Tableau and applying formatting techniques such as hiding headers and adjusting label positions.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Creating a butterfly chart. If I wanna create a butterfly chart, first you have to know what it is. A butterfly chart is a type of chart that displays data as two bar charts presented in a side-by-side format.
This chart is helpful for presenting information that is related, but somehow opposing such as with age or gender breakdowns. So maybe you're comparing two opposing parties, east, west, north, south, or you wanna compare, I don't know, life expectancy for men versus women, and so one bar will be longer than another. You can get some ideas just by going over to Google and searching for butterfly chart.
So I'll go and type butter. Fly chart. I'll press ENTER, and I'll go straight to Images, and then you'll see some of the charts that I'm talking about.
This looks like a pretty butterfly chart. Store A, store B. And so you can do this to get some ideas for the types of charts that you can create. The point is not that the wings are the same size.
They can be different. Let's see, what does this look like? Okay. Store A, store B. So they're pretty.
I don't know how practical they are, but people wanna be able to create them. And so this is not something that is available as an option from the dropdown when you choose to create a chart. You're gonna have to do a lot of work to get it to look the way that you want, especially if you want the text to be in the middle.
So here's a perfect example. I'm gonna open this in a new, and open this image in a new tab. Number of males, number of females.
And so this is the ideal butterfly chart, except you don't have labels, but you can add labels. Actually, the labels are kinda in the middle. We're gonna create three types of butterfly charts.
Simple, intermediate, and advanced. That's the goal of this exercise. When we come back from lunch, we'll take a look at how to create a map.
I think that's gonna be the next topic. So let's create a very simple butterfly chart. This is gonna be the easiest option for you.
If you're just starting out, this is no problem at all. Let me move this over to the side, and let me bring over Tableau. No, that's not what I want.
This is what I want. I'm gonna go over here and resize this. All right, perfect.
I'm gonna create a new worksheet. I'm gonna rename this butterfly basic. This is a basic butterfly chart.
I'm gonna add sales and quantity to the row shelf. So sales, quantity. No, I didn't wanna do that.
All right, so now I'm gonna take subcategory. I'm gonna move it over into columns. I'm gonna choose entire view.
You'll get used to doing that. Oh no, I didn't want this to be a dual, a multi-chart. So this needs to be a butterfly chart.
So I need to swap rows and columns. So I'm gonna go over here and quick swap rows and columns or Control W. Yes. So this almost gets at what I'm looking to do.
That's just organizing the data. It doesn't necessarily look like a butterfly chart. It looks like a multi-chart that's a bar chart, except it's like what we did before, but sideways.
So I wanna make this look like a butterfly chart. So I need to do a couple of things. I need to right click on the left column and choose edit access.
So I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna choose edit access. I have to click in the right place so I can get edit access. Let's see.
No, I don't wanna choose edit alias. All right, I think I'm gonna have to open this up. I'm looking at the labels.
I need to go down here. This is where the access is. Right click here.
I'll choose edit access. Now this is pretty simple. All you have to do is click reversed.
This wing is fine. This is not. I'll click reversed and then I'll close this and there is my butterfly chart.
And then I'll make any adjustments that I need to. So let me open this up so you see the whole thing. This is a simple butterfly chart.
If you wanna add text labels, you can just click here and add them. One represents sales and the other represents qualities, quantity. So maybe for sales, I'll choose a specific color for that.
Maybe orange. And so there's orange and blue. Boom.
I could go and edit this. I'm gonna say butterfly basic. I'll keep that title, but then I'll just say sales versus quantity and I'll click okay.
I wanna make sure that sales is a bar and that quantity is a bar. That's gonna help later on for more complex charts, but you wanna get into that habit. So this is the simplest version of the butterfly chart.
What you can do additionally is add labels. I just clicked on the letter T and added labels. You can choose the color mark for one of the bar charts and change one of their colors.
You don't have to change both. You could. Perhaps move subcategory into the label so you can display the subcategory.
So I'll do that. You can even change the position by dragging that into position. So let me do that.
I'm gonna take subcategory and I'm gonna move it over into labels. Yep, so there it is. Let me bring in sales as well into labels.
Very nice. And then maybe just for the other one, I can leave it just like that. I don't need to repeat labels.
If I wanna hide this, I can right click here and say, you know what? I don't need you anymore. I'm gonna uncheck show header because now when I do my presentation, it looks like this. I just gotta click somewhere to deselect and that is my basic butterfly chart.