Question

Subcategories

  • 19 June 2017
  • 9 replies
  • 418 views

If I have a table of foods and want to create a pie chart that includes fruit, meat, and vegetables. And then I additionally want to display bacon, turkey, and beef as a subcategory of meat, what would be the best way to do so?


9 replies

Userlevel 2

Hi Benjamin,


This is an interesting question! Currently, our pie chart visualization only accepts 1 dimension and 1 measure so this type of hierarchy isn’t possible in a single pie chart. I will definitely pass your feedback to the product team though – were you thinking of something along the lines of a pivoting on the subcategory and seeing those represented as sub “slivers” of similar/the same shades as the parent category?


You may be able to get close to your desired effect by placing two pie chart visualizations next to each other on a dashboard and use custom coloring of the slices to help users map the subcategories to their parent category visually. You could also pivot on the subcategories and select a stacked column visualization where the three bars are the main categories (meat, vegetables, fruit) and each is made up of their subcategories in a stack.


I hope that helps!

Hi Jiro. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Some people call them “multi-level pie charts”. Feature request 🙂


Your workaround may work…will give it a try. If you have other ideas please share. We’re not wedded to a pie chart, so your stacked column visualization idea is a good suggestion.



  • Benjamin

Userlevel 2

Thanks for that link to the visualization, I like that a lot! @jakeyoos and I were talking about this and he suggested this discourse post might be a helpful approach to giving users another layer of drill down. The dashboard example uses a simple pie chart that defaults to a main category which also has a dashboard filter that manipulates the pie chart and associated metrics.


Users can input one of the main categories from the pie chart and the tiles will update to show the subcategory details. In your case the pie chart would default to meat, fruit, vegetables with a relevant chart of some kind, then when a user picks “meat” in the dashboard filter, that pie chart would update with bacon, turkey, and beef.


Userlevel 5
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I also had an idea here I wanted to share. You can change the series colors manually!


So, if you include the broader category, sort on it, and hide it, then you can just color the slices of the pie accordingly. It’s a little tedious but looks a lot more like the link you shared.


You all are the best!!! I will share with our analysts and see what we can implement. Thank you. 🙌

@sam we ran into an issue that there is a row limit for pie charts of 50 rows and we have over 50 subcategories. Womp.

Userlevel 5
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@bgadbaw Womp indeed. We usually recommend using buckets to get below 50 rows in that case. But of course, in this example, you already have buckets and you just want to show the subcategory breakdown.


I’ll pass this along to our product team. There isn’t a way around that 50 row limit, but I suppose you could do subcategory drilling or make a dashboard with a tile for each subcategory.

Where did we land on this? This style of hierarchical visualization is broadly useful, and we’d make use of it.

The link doesn’t seem to be working, but that looks like a stellar set up!! Would love to learn how that was accomplished, we have hierarchies galore.

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