Ten Tableau Text Tips in Ten Minutes

4 – How to make callout numbers

Another tactic I like to use to guide the audience is callout numbers – the large numbers that are typically found along the top or left-side of a dashboard. Callout numbers are a great way to share the overall descriptive story in your dashboard, and one of the only reasons you’ll ever find a text table on one of my dashboards. Another benefit is that they are very easy to set up. Simply drag a measure from the Measures area of the Data pane to the Text Marks Card, click on the Text Marks Card and increase the size to something large such as 28 or 36, and ensure all the filters you’re using on the rest of the dashboard are being applied to the callout number’s sheet.

I personally like to build these as individual sheets because it gives me flexibility in how they’re formatted and laid out on a dashboard. However, you can also put multiple measures onto one sheet.

Here’s an example of callout numbers on a live dashboard. Again, the numbers at the top are just describing the situation at a high level; the rest of the dashboard aims to explain why something is happening.

Tableau Dashboard Element: The Current Versus Comparison Callout

5 – How to conditionally format text in Tableau

In corporate dashboards, I typically like to enhance callout numbers with a comparison to either a goal or past performance. I show the callout number, followed by an up or down triangle, followed by the percentage or percentage point change. The tricky part is I will color the triangle and change based on whether it was positive or negative. Here’s an example comparing the current month’s sales (October) to the prior month’s sales (September).

One way to achieve this is to have the text of the callout number on one sheet and the up / down triangle and % change on a second sheet. You would then color the marks of the second sheet by whether the change was positive or negative. But I’ve got a more elegant solution for you that allows you to conditionally format like this within a single sheet and also works to conditionally format tooltips.

First, you have to set up calculated fields for both positive changes and negative changes. I like to make my triangles and percent changes their own measures so I can have different font sizes for each one. This means that I end up with four formulas:

Up triangle
Down triangle
Percent change when positive
Percent change when negative

I use the IIF function within these calculated fields to display the triangle or percent change when the argument within the calculated fields is true; otherwise it displays NULL. The reason we want to display NULL when the argument is false is because we only want the positive or negative calculations to show up one at a time; never both at the same time. The formulas are:

Up triangle
IIF([Report Month Sales]>[Comparison Month Sales],’▲’,NULL)

Down triangle
IIF([Report Month Sales]<[Comparison Month Sales],’▼’,NULL)

Percent change when positive
IIF([Report Month Sales]>[Comparison Month Sales],([Report Month Sales]/[Comparison Month Sales])-1,NULL)

Percent change when negative
IIF([Report Month Sales]<[Comparison Month Sales],([Report Month Sales]/[Comparison Month Sales])-1,NULL)

Once you’ve got the calculated fields, drag all of them to the Text Marks Card of the sheet with your callout number. Then click on the Text Marks Card to format the text. Put the elements in order (up triangle, down triangle, positive percent change, negative percent change), and format them to your liking. I’ve made the positive calculations blue and the negative calculations red.

Because of the way we set up our IIF calculations above, only the negative calculations will show up in red when the sales comparison is negative, and only the positive calculations will show up in blue when the sales comparison is positive!

Here’s how the same callout number looks when I compare October to August.

How to Dynamically Format Numbers in Tableau

6 – Format text tables like traditional finance reports by editing aliases

I often get asked to format text tables in Tableau with different levels of indention for certain rows like you might see in an accounting report. It’s important to remember that Tableau does not make spreadsheets; even its crosstabs are ‘visual’ representations of the underlying table of data. This is why you can’t simply click into a cell and modify the value or the formatting for that cell.

If you need to have multiple alignments for your table headers, I have two simple tricks for you. For demonstration purposes, let’s say we want to indent the sub-categories in the Sample Superstore dataset alphabetically. ‘A’ sub-categories won’t have any indention; ‘B’ sub-categories should be indented one tab or about 5 spaces; ‘C’ sub-categories should be indented two tabs or about 10 spaces.

I’ll also filter out the other sub-categories to simplify my table. Please excuse my terrible example here, but imagine the sub-categories are different sub-totals or callouts within your finance table. Here’s what the table looks like by default:

The trick to changing the alignment is to simply right-click on each dimension member, choose “Edit Alias…” and add your leading spaces.

Note this will change the sort order as spaces come before letters when sorting in alphabetical order. This can be updated by clicking on each dimension member and dragging it to the proper row. Here’s how my table looks after changing all the aliases and reordering my dimension members to get my desired alignment.

If you are worried about these new aliases showing up on other views within your workbook, you can duplicate dimensions by right-clicking on them in the Dimensions area of the Data pane and choosing “Duplicate”. This will give you two copies of the same dimension, and now you can change the aliases of one but not the other!

The second approach to aligning headers is to add the leading spaces in the underlying dataset. Here’s how an underlying table could look in Excel:

When you create the table in Tableau, the dimension members including the leading zeroes used to align them will be in the table.

How to Align Text Like Finance Reports in Tableau

7 – How to make vertical axis labels in Tableau

My friends over at Workout Wednesday recently had a weekly Tableau challenge that included rotating the labels of a y-axis on a Tableau chart. By default, axis labels are vertical and must be read from bottom to top as you can see with the word “Sales” in the following sales by category bar chart.

What I liked about the approach I saw in the Workout Wednesday challenge was that the word was still laid out vertically, saving horizontal real estate, but each individual letter was rotated – making it easier to read. To accomplish this, create a calculated field and type out the axis label with hard breaks between each letter.

Next, hide the existing axis label by right-clicking on the axis, choosing “Edit axis…”, and clearing out the title.

To add the new title with the horizontal letters, place the newly created calculated field on the Rows Shelf.

8 – How to display methodology on a tooltip when the column header is a dimension

One tactic I implement to help build credibility with my audience is sharing the methodology behind an analysis such as how calculations were computed or where the dataset comes from. In my opinion, the best place to display this is directly on a field itself via a tooltip, but Tableau does not allow you to add tooltips to dimensions in a text table. Well, there’s a hack for that.

First, create a placeholder calculated field. It doesn’t matter what number you use, but I always make my placeholders equal MIN(0). The aggregation MIN guarantees that the number won’t be duplicated should you choose to use a number other than zero.

Then make a chart with the dimensional breakdowns you want, but instead of using measures, use the newly created calculated field. To illustrate how this allows you to add a tooltip to a dimension, here’s a table that looks at the Sub-Category dimension by the Placeholder measure.

Here’s what I was talking about. If I hover over the sub-category headers, no tooltip is displayed. If I hover over the placeholders (which are measures), I see the default tooltips. Again, you can add tooltips to measures but not dimensions.

Here’s the trick. Now that there is a measure on the view, that measure gets its own set of Marks Cards. I can switch the mark type to Text and place the Sub-Category dimension on the Text Marks Card.

Now the names of the sub-categories are listed even though there is technically a measure of zero displayed on the view. This means we can click the Tooltip Marks Card and add whatever information we want.

These tooltips can even be dynamic if you want to provide different information for each dimension member. For even better results, change the mark type to Gantt Bar, change the color of the bars to white so they disappear, and use the dimension members as labels. This will help give the text better alignment.

To finalize the table, hide the first column by right-clicking on the dimension on the Rows Shelf and de-selecting “Show Header”. I’ll also hide zero lines, hide the placeholder x-axis, and add another measure to the view to make a bar chart.

How to Add a Tooltip to a Dimension in Tableau

9 – Don’t neglect the sign-off

Just like the set-up mentioned in the second tip above, the dashboard ‘sign-off’ is an easy opportunity to provide context and add value. I typically leave 75 – 100 pixels at the bottom of a dashboard that can be used to provide links to data sources, add credits, provide information for getting in touch with the author, and/or company branding. All of these help build credibility with your audience and provide a means of support should they have questions.

For an example of a dashboard sign-off, see tip 3 in my series on Tableau dashboard elements, The Signature Line with Data Status Alert.

10 – Don’t use text tables 🙂

I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t close out a series on using text without giving one last plug for the power of data visualization. This series has provided many ideas for leveraging text to provide context, add branding, do string calculations, automate insights, and more – but there is still nothing like preattentive attributes to help us translate complex data to make it actionable.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and remember: A Spreadsheet is Not a Data Visualization and Why You Visualize Data.

Thanks for reading,
– Ryan