When going through training, people are often introduced to highlight tables and are immediately intrigued. That’s because they allow us to create a standard crosstab but use color to call attention to certain values (high or low). But how do we edit colors once we create a highlight table, particularly when totals are involved? Let’s walk through the process.
Let's add Ship Mode to Columns, State to Rows and keep a filter for only the top 10 states with highest Sales. Next, we can turn our crosstab into a highlight table by taking another copy of Sales to Color and changing Marks to Square. Results shown below:
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Soon after, we learn how to quickly bring grand totals to our crosstab by simply double-clicking the Totals option on the Analytics tab of the Data pane:
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But what if we want to create a highlight table that ALSO shows grand totals? We should just be able to create our highlight table and bring in our totals, right? Not exactly. When we bring totals into a highlight table, we get a view that shows our Total Sales as the darkest cell. Who would have thought that Grand Total would be our highest value!?
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How do we get around this? We need to tell Tableau to hide color from our totals by right-clicking on our Sum(Sales) associated with color navigating to the Total Using (Automatic) menu and selecting the Hide option:
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And there we have it, a highlight table that also shows off our grand totals:
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Keep in mind that when using this option, Tableau will assign whatever color “Zero” is associated with. In the highlight table above, light green is our 0 value, so our totals will default to that same light green.
