Tableau Exercise: Building a Sales Heat Map Table with Totals

Jan 14, 2024

I practiced creating a simple Tableau visualization of sales data based on a video in a Udemy course I've been following, 2024 Tableau Certified Data Analyst Training. I actually went through the exercise a few times, because it reinforces a couple of useful techniques: Adding totals and turning a table into a colored heat map.

Here's how it's put together:

1. Download and connect to the Superstore Sales data.
2. Begin building the visualization:
   1. Select and drag Order Date to the "Rows" shelf.
   2. In the "YEAR(Order Date)" pill, select the plus sign to add the sales quarter data.
   3. Select and drag Category to the "Columns" shelf.
   4. Select and drag Sales to the "Label" mark. Note that if you try to add it to the "Rows" shelf, the sales data will instead render as bar graphs.
   5. In the ribbon, from the drop-down menu, select Entire View.
3. Add colors:
   1. Select and drag Sales to the "Color" mark.
   2. To color the table cells instead of the text, under "Marks", select Square.
   3. Select the Color mark and then Edit Colors as desired; I chose Orange-Blue Diverging and checked Reversed.
4. Add sales totals:
   1. Select the Analytics tab.
   2. Select and begin dragging Totals to the visualization.
   3. In the box that appears, drop "Totals" onto "Row Grand Totals".
   4. Repeat the steps to drop "Totals" onto "Column Grand Totals".
5. Format sales numbers:
   1. Under "Marks", right-click either of the SUM(Sales) pills and select Format.
   2. In the "Pane" tab, from the "Numbers" drop-down, select Currency (Custom).
   3. Remove the decimal places and change the display units to Thousands (K).
6. Hide unwanted titles and labels:
   1. Right-click the Sheet 1 title and select Hide Title.
   2. Right-click the Year of Order Data label and select Hide Field Labels for Rows. Do the same for the Category label.

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