Toan Hoang

Having Fun with Overlay Shapes in Tableau

Toan Hoang

I am not the biggest fan of using floating shapes and, if possible, like to create all my data visualisations through drawing polygons. However, a lot of people on my Facebook Group has requested a tutorial on how to create extremely bespoke filled shapes in Tableau. As such, we are going to look at a fun way of creating images and overlaying them on top of a bar chart in Tableau to create the filled shape effect.

Note: This is just for fun, and I do not advocate using this technique for client work unless you have a really good use case for it. However, when having fun on Tableau Public, then why not give this a try.

GIMP

GIMP (/ɡɪmp/ GHIMP; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks. GIMP is released under GPLv3+ licenses and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

I do like using Adobe Photoshop for my image editing but these days I use GIMP a lot more, so in this tutorial, we are going to have fun with GIMP. If you have not used GIMP before, I would suggest you downloading this and giving it a try.

GIMP Website: https://www.gimp.org
GIMP Documentation: https://www.gimp.org/docs

Tableau

Let us get started in the simplest way possible, and that is by building a simple worksheet that displays a bar chart. Let us start by loading the following data into Tableau Public / Desktop.

Metric
0.7

and to create the following worksheet:

You should see the following:

Exciting, I know, but let us:

I know this is not very exciting, but we have basically created a blue block on a dashboard. We will get back to this in a bit, but this is where the fun is going to start.

Creating your Overlay

We will now use GIMP to create a transparent image which we will overlay on top of this visualisation.

Note: I could have used other tools, but as we are going to be working more and more with Graphic Design in our Tableau roles, we may as well have a little play of this now.

There are a few things that we will need to look into:

With our canvas prepared, we are going to create a single letter, yep, we are going to start off with something simple.

You want to have something like the following:

In the Layers window on the right, right-click on an empty space (below the Background layer) and select Merge Visible Layers to combine the G Layer with your Background Layer to create a single image.

With a single image layer created, we will delete the Black Letter:

You should now have the following image:

Note: the checkered background represents the transparent part of the image.

In Menu, go to File and select Export As, give your file and name and select Export.

Overlaying your Image

So now, we will go back to your Tableau Dashboard.

You should end up with the following:

Now, let us have more fun and try different letters or words:

or, if you really want to have a laugh, download and install the Under Font (here) and give this a try.

Summary

I hope you all enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it and as always do share the love. Do let me know if you experienced any issues recreating this Visualisation, and as always, please leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @Tableau_Magic.

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