Chapter 15. 3 Ways to Make Charming Crosstabs: Tip 3
How to Align Text with Precision
Notice on the tables that are built with the Placeholder measure in Chapters 13 and 14 that the default alignment of the text is centered. What’s happening is the text is aligned on a quantitative axis, but there is only one number: 0. Instead of using Text as the mark type, you can change the mark type to Gantt Bar and show the values as labels. The values will automatically move from the Text Marks Card to the Label Marks Card when you change the mark type from Text to Gantt Bar:
This Gantt mark always shows up at zero, which means that you can change the axis range to get the mark to align precisely where you want. I hid the Placeholder header that was showing the axis range of 0, so first I need to get that back by right-clicking any of the Placeholder measures on the Columns Shelf and then, on the context menu that opens, choose Show Header. Now that I can see the axis header, I can right-click it and choose Edit Axis.
One option in this dialog box is to fix the axis range. It’s generally a good idea to right-align numbers, which I can do by setting the axis range from –5 to 0. This will move the Gantt mark to the right of the cell, making the labels appear right aligned:
Here’s my final ...
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