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Troubleshooting Sankey diagrams

If you're having trouble creating a Sankey diagram, it could be because you have cyclical values in your data set.

The easiest way to create a Sankey diagram without errors is to ensure you have distinct values for each category. The categories you define are used in the From and To fields when you configure the visualization.

Let's look at this example data set:

Department

Budget (in thousands)

Type

Sales

80

HR

Sales

40

IT

Sales

20

Misc.

Development

120

HR

Development

67

IT

Development

30

Misc.

Support

75

HR

Support

45

IT

Support

12

Misc.

HR

72

HR

HR

20

IT

HR

10

Misc.

 

In this sample data set, we do not currently have distinct categories. We are using HR as a category in both the Department column and the Type column. If we try to create a Sankey diagram with these values, we'll get an error.

Trying to configure a Sankey diagram with cyclical values results in this error: Data cannot have cycle between From and To values.

We can fix this by using the Replace tool to change the HR value to a different value in one of the columns.

Use the Replace tool to change the HR value to Personnel in the Type column.

With this change, we can now successfully create a Sankey diagram.

With distinct values, we can successfully configure a Sankey diagram. The configuration is: the From field is Department, the To field is Type, and the Value field is Budget.