Crosstabs and Highlight Tables — The Tableau Student Guide

Let’s tackle crosstabs and highlight tables now.

Let’s say your client wants to see just the text info of your bar chart. Here’s a quick shortcut:

- Right click the bar chart worksheet tab

- Duplicate as Crosstab

This is the view you should see:

And there you go. But that’s if something’s already built that you can convert to. What if your client gives you a specific list of what they want?

Let’s say that they want to see how each sub-category’s profits have performed in every month in a text table.

- Drag Sub-Category to Rows, Discrete Month(Order Date) to Columns, and Sum(Profit) to Text.

The text table here is good if we want to see all our data, but it’s very difficult to quickly see trends or insights. The cool thing with crosstabs is that we can do the same thing that we do on our charts with color. We can make a highlight tableau that really emphasizes our performance. This is helpful because our goal when we present data to the client is to help draw their eyes to what is important, especially when you have a large, boring text table.

- Drag SUM(Profit) to Color.

- Change the Marks from Automatic Text to Square

Here we can easily see where we lost profit and where we gained a lot of profit.

The cool thing about Tableau is that, if you notice the color legend, it automatically separated the diverging colors to be at $0, so we can clearly see the profits in blue and losses in orange.