Spotfire Tips & Tricks: Pyramid Charts in Spotfire

Introduction

Pyramid Charts are used to illustrate process flows in which the number of persons or events or activities progressively decreases at each stage. They derive their name from the Pyramid shape. A typical example might involve a Team Structure where you have all Sales and some of them are able to take key account sales and few of them are top performers. Sometimes Funnel Charts, which are just, inverted Pyramids can also represent similar data flow. Another example could be website subscriptions where the bottom represents all users who visited the website a very large number, relatively small users place an order for the free subscription, and out of those only a few registered as paid users, and out of those some made the payment. As you reach the top the numbers taper. However, pyramid charts have visual distortion as found in Funnel Charts - the narrowing width of the triangles and quadrilateral shapes as you move down the hierarchy results in a distorted impression of the magnitude of each segment. It is not an out of box visualization but can be created easily with Spotfire Bar charts.

Pyramid Chart in Spotfire

In order to demonstrate, we can use a simple data set as shown in image and show how Bar chart can be configured to create a Pyramid chart

The data represents designation of the employee as ASE and out of total 200 ASE only 100 are SE and out of 100 SE only 50 are SSE and out of 50 SSE, only 25 are TL. Once data is loaded in Spotfire, the first step would be to create a dummy calculation based out of the number of employees, which is basically total for all minus each category divided by 2.

Create a Bar chart with orientation as horizontal and use designation as categorical axis and the number of employee and dummy calculation as Y-axis. Use color by Column names and have dummy calculation as colorless. Note that Categorical axis has a reverse scale.

In order to show correct hierarchy, you can also use column sort order to define your hierarchy

Now you can view your Pyramid Chart, which is actually a configured Bar chart. Observe that by just changing the scale of category axis same Pyramid chart can appear as a funnel Chart 

Funnel Chart is simply an inverted Pyramid Chart used to show workflows. You can also add more information by using stacked charts and more categories within each pyramid level.