Doing ‘Percent of Total’ in Tableau!

18 September 2018
By Quinn Schiller

Here is an example of a bar chart with two dimensions (the blue pills) in the columns

Screen Shot of Super-Store Data
Example Super-Store Data

However, There are far fewer ‘home office’ records than there are ‘consumer’ records. If we wanted to just show percentage of responses, you can add a quick table calculation by right clicking on the pill and clicking ‘Quick Table Calculation’ and then ‘Percent of Total.’

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By default, the calculation will be computed using Table (Across) which means that each bar is a percent of total of the entire graph. If you want to make it a percent total of the categories on the top, you can change it to “Pane (Across)” instead. Then it will give a percent total of Home Office or Coporate or whatever the category on the top of the sheet is.

Compare using

For comparison, here is what it looks like for comparing ‘Table (across)’  which is percent of total of the entire table vs ‘Pane (across)’ which is just total of the top category.

Table across
Table (across)
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Pane (across)

By using Pane (across), we can see that office supplies is a bigger percentage of Home Office than it is in Consumer.