Dataskera

Pareto Chart

The Pareto Chart answers one question every operations meeting asks: which few causes carry most of the effect. Bars fall from largest to smallest, a cumulative curve climbs to a hundred percent on its own axis, and a threshold line marks where the vital few end and the useful many begin.

Data Requirements

Your Tableau worksheet should include:

  • 1 Dimension for the Category encoding. One bar per value: a defect type, a product, a cost centre.
  • 1 Measure for the Value encoding. The size of each bar and the input to the cumulative curve.

Add Pareto Chart to your worksheet

First, download the manifest file. It tells Tableau where to load the extension from.

Download paretochart.trex

Direct link: https://dataskera.com/downloads/paretochart.trex

Then, in Tableau:

  1. On the Marks card, open the Mark type dropdown, and under Viz Extensions choose Add Extension.
  2. In the Add an Extension dialog, choose Access Local Viz Extensions, then open the paretochart.trex file you just downloaded.
  3. When Tableau asks, allow the extension to access the data in the workbook.
  4. The welcome screen appears. Sign in with your Dataskera account, or on Tableau Desktop choose Use on Desktop without an account. See Signing in & access below.
  5. Build the chart: drag a dimension onto Category and a measure onto Value. The chart sorts itself; you do not need to sort the worksheet.
Tableau Server or Cloud:
A site admin must allow the extension by adding its URL to the site's safe list, and the view needs the Download Summary Data permission. Extension URL: https://vizextension.dataskera.com/paretochart/paretochart.html

Signing in & access

Pareto Chart is free. Whether you need to sign in depends only on what you are doing. Viewing a dashboard never asks for an account, and authoring is free too.

Viewing a dashboard
No account

People who only view a dashboard are never asked to sign in and are never blocked.

Editing on Tableau Desktop
Optional

Sign in, or continue without an account in a single click.

Editing on Server or Cloud
Free account

Sign in with your Dataskera account to author on the web.

No account yet? Create one free in under a minute. No credit card required.

Format panel

Open the Format panel from the extension menu to customize the chart. It is for the dashboard author and is not shown to viewers. It has four tabs:

  • Pareto: the threshold percentage and its line, the split marker between the vital few and the rest, how many bars to draw before the tail merges into one, the curve and its points, click to select, number format and font.
  • Color: a palette, a precise colour per category, and the overall opacity.
  • Legend: show or hide it, its position around the chart, an optional show/hide toggle for viewers, the colour swatch, and the content of each entry.
  • Tooltip: show or hide it, its colours, decimals, and a template you write yourself from the placeholders the chart provides.
A merged tail is not a category:
Past the bar cap the rest is drawn as one bar carrying their true total, and the curve still reaches a hundred percent. That bar stands for many values, so it is not clickable: filtering a dashboard on a name that exists nowhere in the data would be a lie.
Negatives cannot be a share:
A cumulative share of a total is undefined once a value is negative. Those rows are left out of the curve and the chart says how many, instead of drawing a line that folds back on itself.
The split marker is placed, not guessed:
The vertical marker sits at the boundary between the last bar inside the threshold and the first one outside, so the two colours and the marker always tell the same story.
One click, one filter:
With click to select on, clicking a bar selects that category on the worksheet, so dashboard actions and filters follow. Clicking it again clears the selection.