Creating Heart Waffles in Tableau

I was busy with other things and personal commitments, so I am a little late with this blog.

I was inspired by Ellen Blackburn and Josh Hughes’s Visualizations which featured a heart waffle chart and I wanted to create one. Great work Ellen and Josh.

In this, we need 2 datasets, heart points and the main data, which are very similar to a normal waffle chart.

First, load the main dataset. We will be using a simple dataset as shown below.

Next is the heart coordinates. If you know, or have created a Waffle Chart this is easy. The only difference is that in the Waffle Chart, it is 100 points forming a grid, and in the Heart Waffle, it is 100 points forming a Heart, but 1 point is created for the Heart design.

You can find the heart coordinates here.

Now, we will join the dataset. We will be doing an Inner Join with the Dummy Calculation 1, the same as we do for Waffle Charts as shown below.

Now, let’s build the visualization.

Drag X to Columns and Y to Rows. We get a Heart shape. There are 101 points as shown below.

Now, let’s create a calculation to show the Percentage. We want the Average of Percentage data, greater than equal to the Average Percentage value of Heart Points.

We get a True False calculation. Drag the same to Color and we get the following

Drag the Category to the Columns beside X. Use Annotations to show the percentage. After formatting, the visualization looks as shown below.

Hope you found the tutorial helpful. Find the visualization here.

Thank you for reading. Connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and check out my Tableau Public profile for more visualizations.

Vignesh Suresh