Rounded bar chart with a flat side

Are you also in love with Modern User Interface design? Then this blog post might be right for you! While following a webinar by the amazing Tableau Zen Master Chantilly Jaggernauth, I got curious about how to re-create the rounded bar charts she used in her viz. I quickly found a tutorial by the great Andy Kriebel, and got started with it. However, Andy’s tutorial only explained how to achieve a rounded bar chart with two rounded sides.

In this post, I would like to sum up Andy’s method and add a quick trick to get one of the sides flat, and ready to be included in your next Modern UI viz! Once you are done with the instructions below, you can check out my Tableau Public profile for an example of how to integrate this type of chart into a dashboard.

How to: create rounded bar chart (with two rounded sides)

Following Andy’s approach, we are going to:

• Create a horizontal bar chart. In this example, I am going to use Profit per region.
• Double-click on the columns shelf and type AVG(0).
• Drag AVG(0) on top of the Profit axis 
• Change mark type to line. This will make the lines look crooked, but hang on with me!
• Drag Measure Names from the rows shelf onto the path mark on the marks pane. Now the lines should look straight.
• Increase the size

….and here are your rounded bars! Have a look at the video below for a quick demonstration.

How to: create rounded bar chart with a flat side

Now that you have created a rounded bar chart, all you have left now is to modify the axis, so that the left side of the bars will look flat. Here’s how to:

• Right-click on the axis
• Select ‘Edit axis’
• Under ‘Range’ select ‘fixed’
• Under ‘Fixed start’ substitute the pre-existing number with zero.

Extra tip: you want the flat side of your bars to be on the right? You can right click on the axis, select ‘Edit axis’ and under ‘Scale’ select ‘Reversed’.

Here’s what I created, what will you create?

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