At the last day of the Dashboard week, we got a dataset about boybands- a good topic, to create a little bit more playful dashboard and try something new. The data included information about the boybands accessories, so I thought of presenting the most common accessories in different sizes, according to how often they are used.

For that I had to find pictures of these accessories first. As I couldn’t find pictures I liked for all accessories, I had to create three of them on my own. I did that just in power point- careful- it is a lot of work!

But wether you find pictures online or not- what you have to consider is, that the pictures should all have the same size before using them. Because if you want to change their size, according to a specific measure, it’s very important, that they have the same size right from the start, so that the differences in size are visible after bringing the measure to the size.

Using custom shapes in tableau is also easy, you just have to know how: on your laptop you’ll find a folder “My Tableau Repository”-  by default under “documents”- and in there a folder “shapes” where you find all the folders with shapes in them ( path: documents->my tableau repository->shapes ). Here you add a new folder and insert the images of the shapes. As file types are allowed BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF, but mostly PNG is best for it’s specific advantages.

In tableau, drag the pills, which you want to present, onto rows and columns. In the marks card, select in the drop down menu “Shape”, so that the little field “Shape” appears next to “Tooltip”. Over this field you can edit your shapes. Clicking on it opens up the menu field. Go to “more shapes” and under the drop-down “Select Shape Palette” you can choose  your custom shapes. Now you drag a measure on “shapes” and the shapes change their size according to their measure.