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Writer's pictureAvdhesh Gaur

Trend Indicators using Calculated fields in Tableau

ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is the standard that comes into the picture when computers converts numbers into readable text. In addition to all of the ASCII text characters, Alt codes were introduced to cover all of the characters not available on a computer’s hardware.

While the primary purpose of these alternative symbols was to provide characters that required accent marks and foreign-language characters with different styles, there are many other symbols available on your machine when you hold the “Alt” key while entering a numeric code.


How to dynamically format numerical values into triangles ( ▲ and ▼ ) to showcase the change in performance

Every day we come across numerous posts, blogs and even video tutorials on how to create brilliant but complex charts, that might not be quite useful at your own organization. Some require data densification while others don't end up well with huge data sets.

Design with Ease

We @thevizduo.com will be coming up with handy yet useful tips that can be used with ease on a daily basis to attain better productivity at your workplace

How it's done?


In the trivial fashion, lets illustrate the positive change or an increment with an up triangle

& the negative change by a downward facing triangle


Say in a use case we want to find the deviation in monthly sales with respect to the average sales of that complete year

We can create the below calculated field for that and the same can further be formatted as an up triangle if the deviation is positive and the downward facing triangle if its negative.

  • SUM ( [Sales] ) - AVG ( { FIXED YEAR ([Order Date]) : AVG ( [Sales] ) } )

Note that this entire view is generated by just two measures: Sales and Difference. The Difference measure is what is being formatted into the up and down triangles. To do this, right-click on the measure you want to format and choose “Format…”.

After clicking, a new formatting pane will appear on the left. Choose “Numbers”, then “Custom”. This is where you can copy and paste the up and down triangles, separating them with a semicolon “;”. Whatever symbol you place before the semicolon will show up when the deviation is positive; whatever symbol you place after the semicolon will show up when the deviation is negative.




Avdhesh Gaur has 5+ years of work experience with Tableau desktop, taking down various business requirements by building Data-driven Business Intelligence models using SQL, Hive, Tableau, and other Statistical data analysis Techniques.

In a nutshell, He transforms data into visualizations to help organizations understand their business operations more visually.

Avdhesh got one of his submissions to Tableau accepted & placed in their permanent public knowledge database known as "Tableau Gallery" on 7th January 2019, which in a more cooler way we call Viz of the day

He is a featured author at O'Reilly's - Safari Books Online. "Data Visualization with Tableau in Practice" is the recent video course that he had worked on in collaboration with Packt Publishing. The same was released by the End of April 2019.

What you will find in this course ?



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