Hi Susan,

The measure/calculation will be carried across the entire table. To get the difference column only, place it  on a worksheet by itself, hiding all the dimensions, headers, and place it on a dashboard with the other sheet.

Hope this helps!

-Tracy

There is one way to do it that will let you have everything on one sheet:

Take the measures you don't want formatting to apply to (Measure A and Measure B), change them from Continuous to Discrete, and move them into the Rows.

Then, only the Difference Measure should be in the Marks field, and you can conditionally format it however you want.

There may be additional solutions, but this is one I'd use.

Hi Catherine,

You can also use multiple axes with the measures and/or dimensions as text labels to create the view. See this worksheet for details: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/conditionalformattingv4/Introduction

Wow Jonathan, that is absolutely brilliant!  I never thought of using dual axes with text - and multiple sets of dual axes at that.

I'm constantly asked to mimic Excel spreadsheets with Tableau, so this greatly increases what I can do with Tableau.  This is the first I've seen that Tableau has done far more in a simple spreadsheet than Excel.  Thanks for passing it on!

Susan: this should give you several different ways to solve your initial problem, depending on which best meets your needs.

You're welcome!

Hi Jonathan,

This is indeed great, thanks for this tip. But from your workbook (referring to the '

Building the Multiple Axis Crosstab'), I see you have found a way around how to get rid of the additional white column whenever you dragged 0.0 onto the Column shelf. Can you share how you did that?

Second, I see my grand totals are displayed as ####, any idea what might be causing this? If I take my pointer over the ####, it shows perfectly fine values.

Thanks,

Saad

Hello Saad,

Take Measure Names off the Columns shelf, and I think you'll be all set.

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,

That is true. But that will also take out the 'No. of Projects' and 'Forecast Cost Compliance' from the headers. In fact, the only way for a reader to know the column name is if the axes are labelled appropriately. But still, they will be listed right below the data.

Now, for a data containing 10-15 rows that might not make any difference, but if there are too many rows out there, a reader might ask to display the column header at the top.

Any thoughts?

Thanks for your time,

Saad

Check out the "Titles on Top" tab in the workbook. You use a dual axis to create an axis title on the top of the chart that can then be set to the appropriate label.

Thanks Jonathan. It worked out well.