Tableau Basics: Use Separate Legends to Show Specific Measure Changes

Contributed by: Christopher Gardner

Difficulty level: (Beginner/Intermediate)

Imagine your organization’s leadership is looking for information about their key performance indicators for the last four years. You set to work building a highlight table to show the changes in each specific indicator over time—the darker the square the larger the value. Everything is going great until you add the second measure. Now, only one of your measures is truly showing the change year over year, and the other is simply one solid color all the way through. What is happening and why? How can you get each individual measure to have its own levels of highlight?

Using the Sample Superstore dataset, we can easily re-create the issue. We can build a highlight table using the measures Discount, Profit, Quantity, and Sales:

1. Drag Order Date to the Columns shelf.

2. Drag Measure Names to the Rows shelf.

3. Drag Measure Values to the Text shelf on the Marks card.

4. Remove measures until only Discount, Profit, Quantity, and Sales remain.

5. Add Measure Values again to the Color shelf on the Marks card.

6. Change the Marks card chart type to square.

You should end up with a heatmap crosstab.

Figure 1. Crosstab view that illustrates the issue with creating a heatmap with multiple measures.

Hopefully, when you examine this heatmap, you can quickly ...