Sometimes, one may want to try to find relationships, let’s say, between products. When thinking about this, I thought “Hey! Wouldn’t it be cool if I could sort of create a circle of all the products, and then link them together as a network, so I would see who has both product A and product B?”
And, if you’re familiar with Tableau, that’s the kind of question that leads from one thing to another… Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t think the below is a good visualization. But it was a great challenge!
The key here is to remember how Sin(), Cos() and the infamous Pi() functions work so you can layout the products in circle. Then, you need to do some self-join to have those relationships
Part 1: Circle Coordinates (back to the basics!)
1. you need to pick a field you wish to layout on your circle. I recommend creating a calculated field named “Radial Field”, so the next steps are easier. In my case, I’ll use [Product Name].
2. Calculate the X position using this formula: COS(INDEX()*2*PI()/window_sum(countd([Radial_Field])))
3. Calculate the Y position using this formula: SIN(INDEX()*2*PI()/window_sum(countd([Radial_Field])))
4. Put your X on Columns, and Y on Rows
5. Change the table calculations of both fields to compute using “Radial Field”
6. Put “Radial Field” on the details pane (and on the label).
You should end up with something like this:
From there, I suggest you play with this a bit. I will write part 2 soon to get to the next step.
