5 stylish chart types that bring your data to life
As our community members show every day, there are endless inventive ways to visualize your data. And while bar graphs and pie charts have their place, sometimes an advanced chart can be the perfect fit to convey the most important insights, on sight.
Here we offer 5 advanced chart types to bring your data to life:
1. Treemap
Treemaps are a powerful and compact way to visualize hierarchical and part-to-whole relationships. Each branch of the tree is represented as a rectangle, with the size of a branch proportionate to a specified measure of the data. A lot of people like treemaps because they're visually attractive, so understanding how to leverage color is a plus. Color is often used to show dimensions in a treemap—heat maps work well if you want to show a spectrum.
What’s more, you can go way beyond the standard treemap in Tableau. For example, here’s an interactive chart of treemaps mashed up with a bar chart:
2. Histogram
Histograms plot the number of occurrences of a given variable in a set of data. They’re a great tool for getting an overview of the entire distribution of a variable, and they take the form of a bar chart. Imagine using histograms for retail analytics, to count the number of sales of individual products by category. Or in customer analytics, to tally the range of spending in a certain demographic.
Here’s a fun example, where you can explore how many medals were won by Olympic athletes of a certain age:

3. Box plot
A box plot (or box-and-whisker plot) is a diagram of a distribution of data best known for highlighting these values:
- first quartile
- median
- third quartile
- whiskers (1.5 times the interquartile range away from the mean)
- outliers
Box plots are useful for comparing sets of data—especially the variations in the data. They're a favorite of statisticians, and used commonly in statistical analytics. Tableau can plot hundreds of thousands of rows per second, so it can convey much more information than the standard box plot.
Ideal for the housing market, the following example shows home sales in five cities. At a glance you can see that the median price in San Francisco is the highest, but Los Angeles has the most expensive house sold:
