How to pickup a shape based on a cell text in tableau reports

2
votes

I am not a tableau developer but i am just a user of tableau reports. My engineer is telling something is not possible so wanted to take experts suggestions and help to solve the problem.

My requirement is simple. We need to build a report in tableau with 4 columns and the last column should contain a color coded arrows (R,G,Y) representing the data trend (Up/Continuous/Down). The data will change frequently and the input source is excel sheet. My engineer is suggesting that, everytime we have to manually set those shapes in the 4th column, once the report is generated from the excel (basically from the first 3 columns only). I dont like to have a manual intervention everytime in tableau since i am not good at building/editing reports and its not a best practice to automate something.

In below picture the last column is the one i wanted to automatically generated based on excel sheets data.

enter image description here

My suggestion to him is to add the 4 column with data as below and in tableau bring the shapes accrodingly using some kind of a formula or so. GC = Green continuous GU = Green upwards trend GD = Green downwards trend.. followed with different color codes (Green/Red/Yellow) as per data.

Is that possible in Tableau? If so any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Kiran

1
tableau-api
Yes, it is possible. Take a look at this blog post for instructions. bfongdata.com/2015/04/adding-colored-flag-arrows.html – Bernardo

1 Answers

0
votes

It is definitely possible, as long as you have a formula that can produce the GC, GU, etc. values. Then it is simply a matter of mapping your custom values to relevant shapes (which is a simple manual one-off step in Tableau). If built-in shapes are not sufficient, you can add custom ones. Some types of shapes can also be colored dynamically, based on another formula. Use Tableau Help or Google/Tableau Forum to find out how to do all of this.