Use Tableau’s ABS Calculation to Bring Key Values Forward

Contributed by: Christopher Gardner

Difficulty level: Intermediate

On maps and scatter plots within Tableau, we often aim to bring the most important information forward. Sometimes, however, this is not as easy as it sounds. For example, take a map of cities where your company is selling products. Your management would be very interested in knowing which city brings in the highest amount of profit. At the same time, they are also probably interested in which city costs your company the largest amount of profit. In short, they would like to see both on one map. This is where the problem lies.

To illustrate the issue, let’s use the Sample-Superstore data provided with Tableau Desktop and plot out the cities, coloring them by profit. The resulting map is shown in the figure. If you look closely, you will see that the color scale goes from orange to blue, but the map shows very few of these colors (the dot size was increased for visibility).

Figure 1. The map with base colors does not show what your leadership is interested in

The issue is the sorting of the cities within your map. The city field, by default, is sorted alphabetically. This means that cities that start with a letter earlier in the alphabet are covering those that start with a letter much later in the alphabet. Your important values are being covered up by ...