Flowing data posted nice and clear instructions on how to make bubble charts using R. It’s a great post, and I thought it would be a good thing to show how to create the same chart in Tableau. Readers can compare and contrast the ease of each. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Here’s the end result using Tableau:

To create this:

Step 0: Download Tableau Public

This example uses Tableau, so you’ll need that.

Step 1: Download the data file

It’s here:

Step 2: Connect Tableau to the data

Step 3: Build your bubble chart

You only need five Dimensions/Measures on the worksheet to make the view look the same as the one on Flowing Data. I added Colour to State in order to create the highlighting option in the dashboard above. Is this cheating – it’s 6 drag and drops – is that 6 separate steps? 🙂

Step 4: Clean up!

I prettified it a bit by changing the Mark borders and putting it into a well-proportioned dashboard.

The whole process took me 15 minutes. Once your up to speed with Tableau, you can get to work at lightning speeds.

Flowing Data’s post started off by mentioning Hans Rosling and the Gapminder project. Watch this space for more on Gapminder and Tableau….