I have posted my Tableau tutorial #2 for making a weekly error bar chart in Tableau. (Tutorial #1 was for a seasonal chart.) This is replicating prior examples I provided in Excel for IACA workshops and my undergrad crime analysis course.

WEEKLY ERROR BAR CHART TUTORIAL

For a sneak peak of the end result, see here:

Making error bars in Tableau is quite a chore. One approach that people use for Excel, making a cumulative area chart, and then make the under area invisible, does not work in Tableau. Since you can interact with everything, making something that is there but invisible is not an option. You could do that approach and turn the area white, but then the gridlines or anything below that object are not visible.

So the best workaround I found here was to do discrete time, and use the reference band option in the background. This is a good example for non-normal error bars, here this is for low count Poisson data, but another use case I will have to show sometime are for proportion confidence intervals in Tableau. (This is one reason I am doing this, I need to do something similar for my work for proportions to monitor my machine learning models. No better way to teach myself than to do it myself.)

Next up I will have to show an example that illustrates the unique ability of Tableau (at least relative to Excel) – making a dashboard that has brushing/linking. Tinkering with showing that off using this same example data with a geographic map as well. My dashboards I have tried so far all tend to look not very nice though, so I will need to practice some more before I can show those off.