Trellis charts

1. Trellis charts

In this video, we'll focus on trellis charts, or small multiples.

2. Visualizing side-by-side data patterns

It's often necessary to see several charts showing the same information for different groups of data side by side. This enables easy comparison and pattern recognition, and Sigma's trellis charts help us with just that.

3. Call escalation patterns by team

For example, Oakmark Bank's VP of Customer Service is trying to understand patterns in call escalation by team. So, is one team doing a particularly good job resolving customer questions without escalating? Or, is any team struggling at a particular time of day?

4. Call escalation patterns by team

We could display all team's data on a single chart, but small multiples, or trellised, charts make it easy to see patterns and outliers at a glance.

5. Multi-dimensional pie and donut charts

While many chart types can be trellised in Sigma, some of the most popular include pie and donut charts. As we learned in the previous video, pie and donut charts can display values along only 1 dimension by default, such as a count of calls by team. Trellising solves this problem by allowing us to replicate pie charts across a second, and even third, dimension.

6. Multi-dimensional pie and donut charts

As with all visualizations, use your best judgment for finding a balance between enough information and too much - too many trellised charts on a page may become cluttered. Let's see how this is done.

7. DEMO

You may have noticed the Trellis menu in a Sigma chart's Properties panel. Dragging a column onto the Trellis menu will create small multiples of your existing chart. By default, it will create one chart for every unique value in your chosen Trellis column.

8. DEMO

Notice that the trellis menu has space for a column to be configured as either a Trellis Row or Trellis Column. You can place a single field on one of these menus, or you can place a single field on both, but you cannot nest 2 or more columns in either Trellis Row or Trellis Column. Let's see how this works with an example.

9. DEMO

In this workbook we have a single pie chart showing the proportion of calls where fraudulent activity was flagged. We have a column in our Call Log which tells us what time of day the call was received. Calls are flagged as occurring in the morning, midday, evening or night. To see separate charts for each of these timeframes, we could drag the column [Call TimeOfDay] onto the Trellis menu.

10. DEMO

Placing the field in the Trellis Row position will create a separate row of charts for each of the 4 times of day. Switching the [Call TimeOfDay] column to the Trellis Column menu creates charts in columns corresponding to the times of day. Trellising helps us see more granular patterns in the data - like how fraud is more frequently reported at night.

11. DEMO

Trellis charts share color schemes, tooltips and even axes by default. All of this can be edited in the chart's Format panel in the Trellis menu.

12. DEMO

A common action when trellising is to configure the trellis tile size to "Compact". This ensures all the charts are sized to fit within the existing element box, so we can easily see and make the insightful cross-group comparisons that trellising enables. When trellising charts that have an x and y axis, the charts will share a common axis scale by default.

13. DEMO

When trellising charts that have an x and y axis, the charts will share a common axis scale by default. If you ever needed to unsync either axis, this can also be done in the chart's Format panel.

14. Let's practice!

Toggle either button under the Share header to allow each chart to automatically choose its own min and max axis values.

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