How to color code cells of a column based on the text value in Tableau

Question

I'm a new tableau developer trying to develop a table based tableau report. I have a column in the table called "Status" which essentially contains 3 values "In progress" , "Blocked" and "Completed". I want to color code the cells of this column based on these text values. I was unable to get this from the tableau community and hence posting it here. Anyone faced this problem? Kindly let me know how you solved it.

Raghu

Answer 1

First thing, Tableau is not excel. Stop trying to make Tableau work like excel, you'll miss most of the power Tableau brings, and make it inefficiently operate like Excel.

That being said, let me give you an alternative. Instead of text chart (which is what you're using to get a table), select Shape chart. This will add balls in the last column (but you can choose what shape you want)

Now drag the Status to color, and voilà, the balls are painted accordingly to Status. You can customize the shapes too (just drag some field to Shape), and selected what shape and color you want to each value.

This will look more like a "control panel", with the color of the balls something like a traffic light. You can even import some pictures of traffic lights and use them as shapes, that could be cool (if properly used)

Answer 2

Since SO community has thrown it in active threads, let me propose an answer. Though, I completely agree that we shouldn't replicate features of excel in Tableau, yet here is one workaround.

• I took a dummy data like this

• create a calculated field say status cf with the following calculation

CASE [Status]
WHEN 'In Progress' THEN 'Yellow'
WHEN 'Completed' then 'Green'
WHEN 'Blocked' then 'Red'
END

• create two more CFs say 1 and 0 with just 1 and 0 in these as calculations.
• Drag dummy and status to rows shelf. sum(0) and sum(1) to columns shelf.
• Drag status cf to sum(0). Edit sum(0) in marks card with type as shape (square), and increase its size. edit colors as fixed in calculation.
• Drag status to label in sum(1) in marks card. change type to text
• Convert both measures in columns shelf as dual axis.
• After a little formatting, you'll get a text table like this

• You may optionally hide, status col in rows shelf

Answer 3

I know this post is a couple years old, but there is a way to do this. In a new tableau workbook, import the data from Excel (just one column with the status values). Rename the table to "Status Colors" with a dimension field called "Status". Click the dimension field "Status" and select Default Properties > Colors. Assign the colors to each data item (value). For custom colors (RGB, HTML, etc.) double-click the color next to the value and assign the desired color. Click OK, then publish the data source to the server with the options checked to "Include external files". You now have a Tableau data source that can be added as data to any other workbooks that when linked, the [Status Colors].[Status] can be used as the color key for the field on any graphs. The default colors are stored in the data source. If you update the color workbook, then it will update any other workbooks that use this data source.