3D pie charts in Tableau

Earlier today, I posted on the Tableau Forum, suggesting it would be great if Tableau did 3D pie charts. Well, I didn’t think it would be possible, but using some data pre-processing techniques, and hacking the preferences.tps, I’ve worked out a way of doing 3d pie charts in Tableau:

I knew those developers in Seattle would implement this fantastic visualisation technique eventually. Well done Tableau for letting the community take advantage of good quality graphics. I’ll explain how to do it in a subsequent post.

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter to keep up with all the new techniques I discover!

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Only now can Tableau take on the mighty visualization warriors from Oracle. How could our Seattle masters have been so short sighted that this wasn’t included from the beginning?

I can only hope that you’re working on 3D bar charts – I want to show 10 series on my Z axis.

Good work Andy!

A breakthrough. If they can just add gauges, hugely slow down the time it takes to make a dashboard, roll the performance back 4 years, quadruple the price, tableau might truely have a chance of taking on the big boys.

Gartner, I hope you are listening.

Tom

Keen to know what sort of hacks you made to the preferences file.

I do imagine, though, that future versions of Tableau will eliminate the option to make pie charts whatsoever!

This is awesome !! Been dying for this .. my users constantly moaning exporting to xls to do this. Can you send the actual workbook /code so I can implement as well??

Thx,
Chris

Hi Christopher: this post was an April Fool’s joke. I wouldn’t ever condone the use of 3d pie charts as they make accurate reading of data very difficult. The workbook in this post was built using background images.

Check this excellent article by Stephen Few for more background.

Curious to see what magic did you add to preferences.tps to get 3D working? I copied exactly what you did in my workbook but I couldn’t get it to 3D.

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