All tagged Tableau Formatting

How to Suppress Small Sample Sizes in Tableau

Eric Parker
Tableau Calculations

Do you need to publish public Tableau reports but suppress small populations because of sensitivity concerns?

If you work in healthcare, education or another government entity, there's a good chance your Tableau reports contain sensitive information that needs to be suppressed. For example, many organizations we work with need to suppress populations when they are less than five. For example, if we filtered a courts dashboards to see how many court cases there were in Whatcom county for 12-14 year old, Pacific Islander females in 2017 and there were three cases, we would need to suppress that figure because it's less than five.

Customizable Top/Bottom Highlighter in Tableau

Ollie Linley
Tableau Parameters, Tableau Calculations

Text tables can be overwhelming for users. It's hard to know where to focus your attention!

Where are the highest and lowest values in the data? What patterns are there? Upgrading a text table to a highlight table can often do wonders, but a highlight table doesn't provide a singular focus. It will likely highlight high, and maybe low values too.

That's where a custom highlighter can be so handy. Why not let you user control which values they want to call attention to?

Swap Between Measures with Different Number Formats in Tableau

Ollie Linley
Tableau Parameters, Tableau Calculations

Normally, when using a parameter to swap between measures, you're limited to using a single number format in a text table. But what happens when using the same number format makes no sense?

In our example, we're swapping between Total Cost (reported in $) and Visits (a count). We don't want to report Visits as a dollar-denominated amount, and we don't want Total Cost to be reported without a dollar symbol! So what can we do?

How to Add Info Buttons to Tableau Dashboards

Eric Parker
Design, Tableau Dashboards, Tableau General Knowledge

Does your dashboard feel cluttered because you're trying to communicate too much supporting information to your user? Making sure you cover everything your user needs to know can leave your output feeling more like an essay than a data-driven dashboard.

Info buttons are a staple of Tableau dashboards. They allow you to pack so much additional information to a dashboard without cluttering the view for users.