Innovative Tableau

Chapter 42. 3 Ways to Make Gorgeous Gauges: Tip 2

How to Make Gauges with a Custom Background Image

This chapter shows you how to make a gauge with any image. I learned this trick from Tableau Zen Master Lindsey Poulter in her visualization, Best States to Raise Children. Downloading Tableau public visualizations and reverse engineering them is one of the best ways to pick up new techniques.

In the visualization, Lindsey draws an arrow over a custom sequential color palette to communicate performance across five different categories. In this tutorial, I show you how to make a gauge out of a custom background image for a company that is interested in viewing individual responses to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. The following approach is useful any time you want to customize a gauge with an image of your choosing.

How to Customize Tableau Gauges Using Images

Here is an example of a gauge built with a custom background showing a response to an NPS survey with rounded shapes colored to indicate whether the respondent is a Detractor (responded between 0 and 6), Passive (responded 7 or 8), or a Promoter (responded 9 or 10).

Typically, NPS scores are calculated by taking the percentage of Detractors and subtracting that number by the percentage of Promoters, but for this illustration, ...