The Data School - Why won't my parameter controlled view hide properly?

Last week, we had our fourth client project and within that, myself and Hashu found ourselves doing a dashboard makeover for the client and within this, one of our ideas for the dashboard included having a switch between two views, as shown on his blog during Tableau Tip Week.

Our objective was to use a parameter to switch between two shapes – One to appear when there was a positive change (so the shape would have the text above the shape) and one to appear when there was a negative change (so the shape would have text below the arrow)

This was a little hack to ensure that the text field appeared as we wanted it to (as shown below)

So in order to do this we hard to;

– Create negative/positive Boolean – Very straightforward, just adding the ‘measure’ to a calculated field and having [Profit]>=0 so if this added to the filters card
– Second, we had to change the mark type ro ‘Shape’, add our Boolean to the colour shelf on the marks card, and also onto the shape. Our measure would go on text.
Then change the colour to Red if negative or Green if positive depending on what your value change is, and similarly change the shape to an arrow. We used a red filled down arrow as our change was negative. The text can be edited by clicking ‘Label’, and moving it to be centre-below the shape.
This gave us something which looks like this.

– Then, we want to create our positive flip. So, let’s duplicate this sheet and create a new one.

– This bit got slightly tricky; you need to inverse your value calculation in order for your change to be positive (in this case) which then allows us to amend the formatting.

– So once you’ve changed your calculation to be positive, edit the filter to select ‘True’ (you can do this by dragging the pill off then adding the Boolean back on then select the filter) , then change your shape to a green, upward pointing green arrow. The text then can be amended to be centre-above the shape. It should look like this.

Once you have both of your arrows, REMEBER TO REVERT YOUR CALCULATION BACK TO ITS ORIGINAL FORMAT! So for me, the green arrow should disappear once I do this…

Awesome.

Now just a simple case of going to my dashboard and adding both to a container.

Well that didn’t work. Wasn’t the empty view supposed to disappear?

We puzzled over this for a while, messing around with labels, titles and entire views. The answer was remarkably simple.

Putting something on either rows or columns, and then hiding it (right click the pill, show header)

And finally, order was restored, and we had this beautifully dynamic up/down arrow where the labels also moved. A very subtle change, but one which aids the understanding of the dashboard.