Adding Arrows and Colors to Tableau Summary Tiles

By: Eric Parker

Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.

Summary tiles are a great way to quickly communicate a few meaningful measures to your end users in a dashboard.

Adding indicator arrows and allowing the colors of the summary tile to change can make them even more impactful.

Let’s start by changing the colors.

I already have calculations for [Sales - This Month] and [Sales - Last Month]. Now I need to create a calculation which outputs different colors based on whether that value increased or decreased.

Dropping that calculation on color reveals that the output is “Red” because the value decreased.

You’ll need to manually update the colors at this point. Unfortunately, Tableau isn’t nearly savvy enough to interpret the text value of “Red” as meaning that you want the color red.

You don’t want to publish production dashboards with an output that says “Green” but actually displays the text as purple.

Here’s a good trick to make sure that never happens.

Edit your calculation, comment out (double forward slash: //) the value that is currently being returned, and temporarily replace it with the output from another line. Then you can pick the color which that text output should return.

You can see the effect that adding a similar color calculation to each summary tile has:

Sometimes it can be helpful to add an arrow indicator as well. This is particularly true when an increase is a bad thing and a decrease is a good thing (e.g. Order Return Rate).

Once you’ve created a color calculation, it’s really simple to create an arrow calculation. The hardest part is finding the symbols. Here you go: ▲, ▼, ▶.

The color calculation can be duplicated and edited to return the arrows as a text value.

Here’s the updated dashboard aesthetic with the arrows added:

One other design tip, if you really want those summary tiles to pop, you can have the color field change the background color of the tile instead of the text color.

Here’s how to do that.

Change the mark type of your summary tile to Bar.

Put MIN([Number of Records]) on the Size tab in the Marks card and move the size slider all the way to the right. (if you are using Tableau Desktop 2020.3 or later just create a calculation with the number 1 in it).

That’s it! If you haven’t changed your text color it should adjust automatically based on the darkness of the background color.

Notice how much more the summary tiles stand out when the background color changes.

Want help with your own Tableau dashboards? Sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to get Eric’s help!