Icons in Tableau

Danial Khilji

4 min readSep 14, 2022

Ever wondered how people make such cool visualizations in Tableau? and using icons?

There’s lot of pros of using icons in Tableau:

Helps visualize single value information
Can be used as a filter
Makes visualization more interesting

Lets see how

Download the icon 📍:

You can use any image or as usually preferred use PNG file for icons. Use whatever icon suits your data or value you want to visualize. In my case, I want to show average coordinates difference between two datasets which is just a single value in meters.

Save the icon 💾:

Go to the Documents ->My Tableau Repository ->Shapes folder 📂. You can now save you image in any of the folders within the Shapes folder or create your new folder and save it there.

Load data in Tableau 📀:

Now open the Tableau, load data and open a new sheet. To make things easy I loaded a .csv file with just one value that I need to visualize. Now drag the value from the Tables panel on left side (I am draggning Value tab)…

…to the Rows panel on top.

Now, hover over the moved tab and you’ll see a tiny drop-down arrow on the right corner of the tab. Select that and select Discrete.

Change the shape 🛠️:

Just on the left panel of visualization, you’ll see three panels…

…select the drop-down option in Marks section and select Shape.

Go to the Rows section on top and select the drop-down again and select Show Header (this will remove the value right next to the shape).

Load shape in the Tableau ⏳:

Select the Shape icon under the Marks section and select More Shapes at the bottom…

You’ll see a new window pop up on the screen with few icons to use right away. If you want you can use these too. Select Default option and locate the folder where you saved the icon. If you don’t your shape in any of the folders then select Reload Shapes option at the bottom of the window.