How to Create a Dual Axis Bullet Graph in Tableau 7

(This is an old post from February, 2011 that I thought was worth posting again.)

You need to start with a set of data with actuals and a target.  In this example the target is a monthly sales quota of widgets and we compare this with sales to date.

First you create a calculated field for the ratio of sales to date to your goal.  This creates your percentage for your first axis. (You could just as easily calculate the percentage as a field in your data source and this might be preferable if you are creating multiple bullets for many targets.)

From there the easiest way to get a bullet graph in Tableau is to use the show me menu.  To do this select your sales to date and sales goal fields and select bullet graph from the show me menu.  You now have a single axis bullet.

Now we have to do some trickery to get Tableau to give us the second axis.

First you drop the percentage field to the Columns tray.  This will create two side by side bar charts.

Next you drag the percent axis and drop it on top of your bullet graph.

Now that we have the dual-axes there are some additional formatting steps to clean things up:

You want to change the color palette to one of the single gradient palettes and make the percent of goal measure a darker shade and sales goal a lighter shade.

You should also change the formatting of the top axis to percentage.

There is also a bug in Tableau that you will notice.  The reference line for the goal of 10,000 units doesn’t cross at 100% of your top axis.  Tableau provided me with a fix for this.  If you set the axis ranges proportional to one another then they will line up.

So in this case if you extend the upper end of the range of the percentage axis to 1.05 this will cause things to line up.  Be careful, though, this axis is now fixed and won’t automatically update if you place the bullet on a dashboard.  This is less than ideal, but unless you have wild swings in the magnitude of your measures you should be fine.

Your final bullet will look something like this:

Special thanks to Kristofer Still for helping to document the instructions for the dual axis bullet graph.