In a previous article, I shared my journey of making one visualization every week since 2018 — I actually have 350+ of them now on my Tableau Public profile! Not surprisingly, amongst all of the visualization types, I actually have used bar charts and line charts essentially the most. They’re easy but highly effective and intuitive in telling stories. Nevertheless, I sometimes feel bored making similar charts over and yet again, and so they could fail to display complex data patterns.
In this text, I’ll introduce seven less common but powerful visualization types. I’ll discuss their specific use cases, share my visualization examples, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and show you how you can create them in visualization tools like Tableau.
A bump chart is a special variety of line chart that visualizes the change in rank of multiple categories over time. Its y-axis is the category ranks, so it shows how the categories “bump” one another up and down over time. Subsequently, It is ideal to display the competition between categories.
