Such a simple view, it required 100 steps!! - Having Multiple KPIs -

Olympic is ongoing and this is the typical timing when people in U.S. think about their nationality.

It's natural for two BIG countries to compete the number of Medals, but I'm afraid that they compete each other too much seriously in every arena.....

 

Today's topic is one of most famous FAQ.

That is

  • "How to Put multiple KPI in the table"  or
  • "How to Put different color to multiple Measures"

The Final VIZ I want to create is like below.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810025841p:plain

Three different measure (Sales, Profit, and G.M.%) must have different color.

It's easy to put one measure in the table and color them by only one KPI.

For example, putting Sales data and Sales KPI as color, we can get a table like this. 

f:id:skn_0410:20160810030446p:plain

Also it's easy to put three different measures in Column without color KPI.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810030746p:plain

 

But when you try to put colors on these three measures, we will see all three measures show same color.  

f:id:skn_0410:20160810031001p:plain

 In other words, Profit and G.M.% are also showing "Sales KPI color".  Defenitely, this is not we want.

Again this is one of the most frequently asked questions and this is fairly common view.

And we have the answer.

However, this is not a kind of "Here is an answer !" type of situation, but level of "This will work if you really need something..." 

If Tableau want to dominate the position of top BI tool, this is one of the most important function I strongly recommend to add. If Tableau development team think that the problem is already solved with current shared approach, that is not good understandings.

Imagine how difficult it is that community members spend long time to answer this question every day.....

Anyways....

 

 How to approach this problem?

 

We need "Place Holder" to put fields in, which is "1".

You can add "Dummy" as calculated field with numeric 1. 

f:id:skn_0410:20160810033924p:plain

Then put this fields in column with "Minimum" as Measure.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810034352p:plain

Then copy twice for three measures.

Now we have three Bar Graphs.

On first Bar Graph put "Sales" filed on Label and "KPI (Sales)" on Color.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810034656p:plain

Then edit Axis,

f:id:skn_0410:20160810034857p:plain

f:id:skn_0410:20160810035118p:plain

 

f:id:skn_0410:20160810035204p:plain

 

To add Title on the Top instead of Bottom, same field of "Dummy" needs to be put to the secondary Axis.

 

f:id:skn_0410:20160810035411p:plain

 

f:id:skn_0410:20160810035757p:plain

 Tableau's "Automatic" chart type assignment sometimes do rediculous job, but don't worry.

Change original Graph type to Bar Chart, secondary Chart tyep to Text.

Actually , we don't care what is the secondary graph type because this is only for the purpose of putting "Header" on the Top Axis.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810040014p:plain

Edit Axis on the secondary (Top) axix.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810040147p:plain

Type in "Title"

f:id:skn_0410:20160810040337p:plain

Remove Tick Marks

f:id:skn_0410:20160810040412p:plain

Then Change the Color Transparency to "Zero" 

 

f:id:skn_0410:20160810040544p:plain

 

Then Go to Bar Chart and Change the Alignment Horizontal to "Middle".

f:id:skn_0410:20160810040845p:plain

We finally got this view.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810040928p:plain

 

And same steps need to be done on two other Measures of "Profit" and "G.M.%".

Now we got this view.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810041425p:plain

 To fill the Gap of vertical "blank", we change the Size of Bar Chart.

f:id:skn_0410:20160810041836p:plain

After we do x3 of above, we got this View as Final x Final

 

f:id:skn_0410:20160810041952p:plain

 Such a simple view, it required more than 70 steps to accomplish without any failure !! 

Considering some trial end erros (Erros require 2x steps),
it requirs 100 steps!!!

I don't have any simpler way to create this type of view.. Definitely Tableau Development Team's awareness and support is neeed.

Tableau community has the feature of collecting "Ideas" and I think below idea is close to our needs. You can vote here of course.

Conditional Formatting of Measure Names/Measure... |Tableau Support Community

Though, one of difficulties, I think, is the way "Naming"/"Expressing" this requirement itself is not consistent...

Anyways, Enjoy Tableau !!

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