What sort of chart?  (i.e. what mark types, continuous or discrete axes, number of marks, etc, etc).

Maybe include a screenshot.

Pretty sure someone will come up with a way of conveying the information.

How about just including the dimension that you have on the colour shelf as another field on Rows as well.  You can either show it explicitly, or hide the values (by unchecking show header) and use that to generate the vertical separation, as in the 2 attached images.

;-)

I got asked this question by a partner the other day and put together the attached workbook. Overlapping points can be "jittered" out in a circular pattern from their original location. This example allows you to set:

  - Jitter on/off - plot at jittered locations or their original locations

  - Spread rotation - allows you to spin the jittered points to avoid overlaps

  - Spread factor - how far to spread the points (useful when zooming out)

  - Cluster sensitivity - allows you to define clusters of close data points (again - useful when zooming out)

It's shown with a scatter chart but it would be easy to extend this to a mapping scenario. Hope you find it useful.

Cheers,

Alan

Just a comment: another proof that Tableau can be bent and hacked every which way.

Really neat solution, Alan! Great job.

To add to this (old) thread, Steve Wexler has a good blog post about this using index() on an ID to create the jitter (I’ve Got the Jitters (and I Like it!) | Data Revelations). If that doesn't work, I suggest this in the comments:

Here's a good one - plotting total hours worked by index based on employeeID. Should work fine, no? No, a tail is created because (of course) employeeIDs appear later in the data for new employees, so those hired halfway through the data period will have a lower total hours and appear to the right side...

 

 

One way I've dealt with this is to use a mod function on the index that provides a suitable spread for the width of the data: index()%100 for example

 

 

While nowhere near as comprehensive or configurable as the example on Russell's link (Alan's tbwx above), it's a little simpler.

Hi Alan,

I would like to use your jittering approach on a map, but I'm finding that I can't generate the "New X Coord" and "New Y Coord" values because Tableau won't let me create any calculated fields on top of the Latitude (Generated) and Longtitude (Generated) pills.

I'm assuming one approach would be to copy the generated Lat / Long values out & paste them back in again as a clipboard data source.  This would at least let me perform calculations on top of them.  But I'm wondering: is there a nicer way to jitter overlapping points on a map in Tableau ?

Thanks!

Keith Helfrich | Twitter

Red Headed Step Data

Facing a similar situation, did you end up ever getting a solution, re: map jittering?

hey, i've seen jitter dealt with in a slightly different way. rather than randomly shifting points around, you can convert the scatterplot axis measures to dimensions and move the 'Number of Records' measure to the size shelf. select marks to circle and you get a nice density representation.

steph.

Hi Alan,

your solution is working very well, bingo! but somehow I am not able to see your code.

we can see only dashboard and sheet but not calculated fields.

can you please post detail worksheet.

Regards,

RAV