# How to build Scatter plot in Tableau | Tableau Charts

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2023-02-04
- **Format:** Video · 4 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation
- **Tools:** Tableau (calculated fields, filters, formatting)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/how-to-build-scatter-plot-in-tableau-tableau-charts
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOEar3BZeic

I show you how to build a scatter plot in Tableau in around two minutes using life expectancy data. I cover plotting adult mortality against life expectancy, changing aggregation to average, adding detail and discrete years, formatting the marks, and using sets and trend lines to compare countries.

## Key takeaways

- Place two continuous measures on rows and columns to create the basis of a scatter plot, then add a dimension like country to detail to split it into individual points
- Tableau aggregates measures by default as a sum, so switch to average when your data spans multiple years to get meaningful comparisons
- Convert continuous year to discrete and add it to detail to spread points out and convey the story better
- Format marks to a single circle, reduce size and opacity, and add a white border to handle overlapping data points
- Create a set of selected countries on colour and add trend lines to compare correlation between those countries and the rest of the world

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/how-to-build-scatter-plot-in-tableau-tableau-charts

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena