Color Control Challenge

tableaucommunity@tableau.com — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 17:20:54 GMT

Hello Tableau Community,

Who is ready to take on a challenge, and make our team's day?

Dashboard Concept: We have a 12-month trend showing the Monthly movement of a KPI. This 12-month trending chart is controlled by the "last()" function, and not by the Date parameter. This KPI is color-coded by a Month-over-Month change where a 0-3% change is considered Neutral (Gray), a > 3% change is considered Up (Green), and a monthly change below 0% is considered Down (Red). We also have a KPI bubble call out, which highlights the selected month. This bubble call out is dynamic.

Issue: We would like the monthly KPI bubble call out to be shaded the appropriate color (Gray, Green, or Red) based on what month is selected in the Date selector (which will be a parameter, as this section is part of a larger Dashboard with blended data). This is tricky because the LOOKUP functions used in the 12-month trending chart can't be used for the monthly bubble call out since it is being filtered by an individual month and cannot reference previous months to determine the appropriate color.

Requirements:

-There will only be ONE parameter (Date) on the entire Dashboard. Eventually we will add another filter to control Regions, but the proposed solution would not add any filters or parameters to this Dashboard.

-Switching the Date will change the KPI call out to the appropriate color

Ideal Solution:

-Switching the date to June 2014 changes the color of the KPI call out bubble to Green. Switching to December 2013 would change the color to Gray, to match the 12-month trending chart on the right.

We've tried many paths but are stuck. A possible answer we brainstormed involved a complex calculated field placed on the color shelf that would control both views, but we haven't been able to execute on this idea.

With our fairly specific requirements, have any of you done anything similar? We're very stumped and looking for any way to solve this, even very creative solutions. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you for your help!

Kenneth

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Color Control Challenge