Highlight tables are one of my all-time favorite Tableau visuals. You can pack so much information into a limited space. One of the only weaknesses of highlight tables is that they usually display every label (too cluttered) or no labels (too bare). Most users are looking for a specific insight. Maybe the want to focus attention on the highest values, lowest values, or top N.
All in Design
“Can Tableau do conditional formatting?”
Lots of new Tableau users, especially with Excel skills, want to know if they can use Tableau like Excel. Tableau isn’t really designed like Excel. It’s not intended for data input, but rather data preparation and visualization. That said, a lot of features you might be used to from Excel like highlighting cells or highlighting rows of values are possible!
So let’s say you built a worksheet in Tableau and the row labels aren’t repeating for every row in the table. For example, maybe a year or quarter field is only showing up once instead of repeating.
Having a lot of zeroes in a crosstab or highlight table can be clunky and visually overwhelming. Lots of zeros can divert your users' attention away from actual data values because the visual looks cluttered.
So you’re building a pie chart, huh? You’ve ignored all the naysayers and pie chart haters and you’re going to build it anyways. Good for you!
First off, let me give a huge shoutout to my colleague Klaudia for inspiring this post. She put together a dashboard format for a client we work for and I found it to look so sharp that I’ve adopted it for my own uses!
If you are looking for some inspiration for how you can make your Tableau business dashboards more visually intuitive, you’ll want to check this out! I walk through all the design steps in the video below.
Have you ever run into a situation in Tableau where you add labels to the ends of your lines, only to find out those labels are overlapping the lines and are borderline illegible?
Have you ever noticed how axes in Tableau worksheets are always at the bottom? That can feel counterintuitive to end users. They have to go all the way to the bottom of the worksheet and read the axes to determine what the worksheet is trying to communicate.
I was recently reading the book Principles by Ray Dalio (who founded one of the largest hedge funds in the world). He has an interesting mind and displayed a chart for visualizing data over time series, ranking values against each other. He mentioned that good thinkers are generally able to identify and visualize trends well. His chart looked something like this.
I provide summary tiles at the top of most dashboards I build to provide easy-to-find, bite-size information for my end users. There are a couple primary approaches to creating summary tiles in Tableau and a few tricks you can utilize to make them look crisp.
In Excel, you can easily highlight an entire row in a spreadsheet by selecting a row and adding fill to the background of the cells. How about Tableau however? Tableau highlight tables get you close, but one of their shortcoming is they don’t highlight the background of dimensional headers.
I recently received an email from a blog reader who was trying to solve a problem I’ve come across several times. He was representing populations on a map of the world in a chart that looked something like this.
I recently saw some visuals built in a non-Tableau data visualization tool (not sure which one) that were utilizing emojis in dimension labels. I thought it was a fun way to mix up the standard labeling and text tables we usually see.
Last week, I published a blog post about the power of compound interest and embedded related a Tableau Public dashboard (also below).
According to a number of questionable sources, Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.”
Progress toward a goal is a powerful way to motivate stakeholders toward achievements. Tableau is a great tool to help visualize progress toward a goal using reference lines, highlight tables, donut charts and custom images.