This is the closest I could come to what you are describing. I couldn't get the highlighting behavior to work quite like you described. The best I could do is to use menu highlighting (via the tooltip of the end points). If someone else can figure that part out, I'd love to know how.

Nice solution Bill Lyons but I coloured the lines by Value as well (just so it didn't have everything in blue).  I also noted that on the Lines worksheet, if I can on a circle on the left side it highlights all lines, but if I click a circle on the right side the behaviour is not the same ... on the dashboard it doesn't work the same way

Most visualization experts (Tufte, Few) advise against redundant visual cues (e.g. size and color for same measure).

As for the difference between the worksheet and the dashboard, I was attempting to do the desired highlighting in the worksheet, but could only get one direction to work at a time. The dashboard was my second attempt, but the only way I could get bi-directional was via the tooltip. I also tried unsuccessfully to get them to highlight by selecting elements from the floating worksheets. Sorry if it isn’t perfect. Spend several hours this weekend trying.

bl

“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”

Hey Casey,

This type of visualization can actually be achieved by building a "Sankey" diagram. We don't have official walk throughs of this type of visualization, but this has been pulled off pretty spectacularly by Jeffrey Shaffer. Below are a few tutorials, the second one just came out a few days ago and is written by guest host Olivier!

I used the first one to build this example. I started on the 2nd one, but wasn't able to finish it as I haven't had too much free time lately. You should give it a whirl (the 2nd link), as it's more what you're looking for.

Data + Science with Lines

Data + Science  with Polygons

Cheers,

Very intriguing! Thanks!

bl

“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”

The Sankey diagram is excellent! I think all will agree that this solution is MUCH better! Thank you Zach Pipkin!

WOW, that's awesome !!!

I saw this type of graph about a month ago, but thought I might have to use D3.js if I ever had to do it ... not any more though

Awesome work! Looks like you got the polygon version working!

And don't thank me, thank the excellent Jeffrey Shaffer and Olivier CATHERIN!

Cheers,

Yes, many thanks to Jeffrey Shaffer<http://community.tableau.com/people/jeffreyshaffer> and Olivier CATHERIN<http://community.tableau.com/people/olivier.catherin>!

bl

“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”

Hi Bill,

I would suggest few things you could bring to your viz :

1) hide the toolbox controls : if you choose to keep or exclude it won't work well

2) use the Highlight dashboard action to show the path when hovering over the flows

3) You also don't have to build a dashboard using floating elements : you could change the width of the bar chart using the size control in the marks windows.

By the way, I am glad it helped !

Olivier

First, I want to thank you again for your post that made this possible. It really opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities.

Regarding your comments:

1) hide the toolbox controls : if you choose to keep or exclude it won't work well

I wholeheartedly agree. I would do so if I were deploying this to production. In this case I didn't do a lot of finishing touches because I was merely trying to answer the question of the original post by Casey Lott. I would also remove the grid lines, zero line, and boarders, touch-up alignment and centering, clean up tooltips to the desired values and descriptions, size it for the target display device, add accreditation and version numbering, hide the worksheets, and probably a few other things.

     2) use the Highlight dashboard action to show the path when hovering over the flows

This is probably a personal preference. Sometimes I like hover highlights, and sometimes I prefer clicks. I have seen many times where the hover highlight remains after moving off the object, which I find annoying. And again, the original post specifically requested "select" or "click."

3) You also don't have to build a dashboard using floating elements : you could change the width of the bar chart using the size control in the marks windows.

I started with it that way, and even with the bar width all the way up, I found the boarder Tableau inserts between dashboard elements to be objectionable. If someone can tell me how to eliminate that, I would be appreciative. While normally this is visually pleasing, there are times like this when you really want it seamless. By floating them, I was able to reduce the separation to a fine line. I just now found that if I remove the boarders of all the objects, that line vanishes completely when floating, which is beautiful. But it still leaves a gap with fixed (non-floating) sheets.

Another thing I would like, but haven't found a way to do, is to eliminate the "Color Code Paths" parameter, and have it automatically switch the color coding direction when selecting (or hovering) on the left or the right. Any ideas on that?

I think this is a very valuable viz technique, which I plan to use with real data in our environment, which is why I spent the time to learn it for this example. Thanks again!

bl

You are right. I wish I had the solution for customization the highlighting or selection action ! Has it already been suggested to Tableau ? This would had very interesting new capabilities to dashboards !

Olivier