Innovative Tableau

Chapter 48. 3 Innovative Ways to Use Text: Tip 2

How to Conditionally Format Text

One of my favorite dashboard elements are large explanatory metrics that I call callout numbers (see Chapter 95 in Practical Tableau, O’Reilly, 2018). These are nothing but text tables built with oversized fonts that communicate KPIs at a very high level. I typically like to enhance these callouts with a comparison to either a goal or past performance. I show the callout number, followed by an up or down triangle, followed by the percentage or percentage point change. The tricky part is that I will color the triangle and change based on whether it was positive or negative.

Here’s an example comparing a hypothetical current month sales to the prior month sales:

One way to achieve this is to have the text of the callout number on one sheet and the up/down triangle and percent change on a second sheet. You would then color the marks of the second sheet by whether the change was positive or negative. But I have a more elegant solution for you that allows you to conditionally format like this within a single sheet and provides the ability to conditionally format tooltips.

First, you must set up calculated fields for both positive changes and negative changes. I like to make my triangles and percent changes their own measures so that I can have different font sizes for each one. This means that I end ...