Toan Hoang

Tableau QT: KPI Text Indicator

Toan Hoang

A lot of the dashboards I create today are Executive KPI Dashboards; this basically means KPIs and indicators. In this Tableau, Quick Tip, we are going to build a simple KPI Dashboard and use Unicode characters as the KPI Text Indicator.

Data

We will start by loading the following data into Tableau Desktop / Tableau public.

Orders Data Source

Note: If you have Tableau Desktop, you can use the Sample data source, but if you are using Tableau Public, download and load the following data source.

Calculated Fields

We only need a single Calculated Field for our Data Visualisation.

Sales (2017)

IIF(YEAR([Order Date]) = 2017,[Sales],NULL)

Sales (2018)

IIF(YEAR([Order Date]) = 2018,[Sales],NULL)

Sales Growth (2017 vs 2018)

ZN((SUM([Sales (2018)])-SUM([Sales (2017)]))/SUM([Sales (2017)]))

Note: Yes, for our example, we have hardcoded the years, but you can make this more dynamic.

Sales Growth (Negative)

IF [Sales Growth (2017 vs 2018)] < 0 THEN
    STR(ROUND([Sales Growth (2017 vs 2018)]*100,1))+"% ⯆"
END

Note: we can use Unicode in our text, so do make full use of this.

Sales Growth (Positive) 

IF [Sales Growth (2017 vs 2018)] > 0 THEN
    STR(ROUND([Sales Growth (2017 vs 2018)]*100,1))+"% ⯅"
END

Sales Growth (No Change)

IF [Sales Growth (2017 vs 2018)] = 0 THEN
    "0.0% ⯈"
END

With this done, let us start creating our data visualisation.

Worksheet

We will now build our worksheet:

You should see the following:

Now we will edit text, click on the Text Mark and Change change the text to the following (including colours):

At any given time, only one of the growth rates will show, and with a little formatting, filtering, and adding versions of this sheet to a dashboard, you can end up with the following:

and boom, we are done… I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and as always, you can find this data visualization on Tableau Public at https://public.tableau.com/profile/toan.hoang#!/vizhome/KPITextIndicator/KPIsTextIndicators

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 Visualization, and as always, please leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @Tableau_Magic. Do also remember to tag me in your work if you use this tutorial.

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