Tableau Basics: Use Measure Values to Label Single Measures
Tableau is an extremely powerful tool for data visualization, but sometimes even the simplest tasks can be challenging. Take, for example, crosstabs. Sometimes your user just wants to see the numbers on the screen instead of a bar or line. It makes data validation easier. Tableau provides crosstabs as a visualization option, but formatting them to show up correctly can be a challenge. Let’s look at an example using the built-in Superstore dataset.
To start, we’ll bring in a single dimension, Sub-Category and place it on rows.
Figure 1.
Next, we want to show the sales for each Sub-Category. To do this, we drag Sales to the Text field on the Marks card.
Figure 2.
Once we do this, our crosstab shows how much Sales each Sub-Category had for our data set, but something is missing. The measure Sales has no label on the chart. How do our end users know if this value is Sales, Profit, or something else? We want to label the column. This is surprisingly difficult to figure out how to do in Tableau if you aren’t already aware of this easy trick.
To add the label, you simply click and drag Measure Values directly on top of the numerical Sales values in the chart. ...
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