How to Add Up or Down Arrows in Tableau

Adding simple up or down arrows to your Tableau dashboards can instantly make your data more understandable. These small visual cues show performance trends at a glance, telling your audience whether key metrics are improving or declining without forcing them to read every number. This guide will walk you through a couple of common methods for adding these powerful indicators to your reports.

Why Use Indicator Arrows in Your Dashboards?

Before getting into the “how,” it helps to understand the “why.” Our brains process images much faster than text or numbers. Indicator arrows are a prime example of effective data visualization because they:

• Provide Instant Context: A green upward arrow next to revenue signals “good” immediately, a red downward arrow signals “bad.” This shortcuts the mental effort needed to interpret the data.
• Focus Attention: Arrows highlight what's most important — the change. In a table full of numbers, these indicators draw the eye to the key trends, positive or negative.
• Save Space: Arrows are compact. On a crowded dashboard, they can communicate as much information as a sentence like "Sales have increased by 15% period-over-period" in a fraction of the space.

They’re most effective on key performance indicator (KPI) scorecards, performance comparison tables, and any view where you’re comparing values over time.

Preparation: Calculating the Change You Want to Visualize

You can't add an arrow if you don't have a number representing change. The first step is always to create a calculated field that measures the difference between two points in time or against a target. A common example is Year-over-Year (YoY) growth.

Let’s say you're working with the famous Sample - Superstore dataset included with Tableau. To calculate YoY Sales Growth, you'd first need a calculation for Sales for the most recent year and another for the prior year.

Step 1: Create a Calculation for Current Year Sales

Create a calculated field named Sales (Current Year). This formula uses a Level of Detail (LOD) expression to isolate sales for the last year in your dataset.

IF YEAR([Order Date]) = {MAX(YEAR([Order Date]))}
THEN [Sales]
END

Step 2: Create a Calculation for Previous Year Sales

Create another calculated field named Sales (Previous Year). It’s very similar, just subtracting 1 from the most recent year.

IF YEAR([Order Date]) = {MAX(YEAR([Order Date]))} - 1
THEN [Sales]
END

Step 3: Calculate the Year-over-Year Growth Percentage

Finally, create the calculation that gives you the growth percentage. We’ll call this YoY Sales Growth %.

(SUM([Sales (Current Year)]) / SUM([Sales (Previous Year)])) - 1

With this YoY Sales Growth % field, you're ready to add the indicator arrows.

Option 1: Using Custom Number Formatting (The Quick Method)

This is the fastest way to add arrows directly to a number in a text table or KPI card. It relies on changing how Tableau displays a number, without altering the number itself.

Imagine you've built a simple table showing Sales growth by Sub-Category. You’d drag Sub-Category to Rows and your YoY Sales Growth % calculation to Text on the Marks card.

Now, let's format those numbers to include arrows.

How to Apply Custom Number Formatting:

1. Right-click the YoY Sales Growth % pill in your view (the one on the Text mark) and select Format...
2. In the formatting pane that appears on the left, make sure you're on the "Pane" tab.
3. Under the "Default" section, click on the "Numbers" dropdown and select Custom.
4. In the "Format" box that appears, copy and paste the following code:

▲ 0.0%,▼ -0.0%

You’ll immediately see your numbers transform in the table. All positive numbers will have an up arrow, and negative numbers will have a down arrow.

Cool Trick: You can quickly find arrow symbols by searching on Google for emojis or special characters, then just copy and paste them into the format box. Here are some you can copy: ▲ ▼ ↑ ↓ ↗ ↘

How Does Custom Formatting Work?

The standard custom format in Tableau is made of up to three parts, separated by semicolons:

Positive Numbers , Negative Numbers , Zero Values

So, our format string ▲ 0.0%,▼ -0.0% tells Tableau two things:

• For any positive number, display an up arrow, then the number formatted to one decimal place as a percentage (▲ 0.0%).
• For any negative number, display a down arrow, then the number formatted to one decimal place as a percentage (▼ -0.0%).

If you wanted to handle zero values differently, you could add a third part. For example, to show a neutral circle for zero growth, you could use:

▲ 0.0%,▼ -0.0%,● 0.0%

Option 2: Creating a Separate Calculated Field (The Flexible Method)

The custom number format is great for simplicity, but it has limitations. You can’t control the color of the arrow independently of the number, because they are formatted as a single element. If you want a green arrow for positive growth and a red arrow for negative growth, you’ll need a more flexible approach using separate calculated fields.

This method involves creating two fields: one for the arrow and another for the color logic.

Step 1: Create a Calculated Field for the Arrow

Let's make a new calculated field called Trend Arrow.

IF [YoY Sales Growth %] > 0 THEN "▲"
ELSEIF [YoY Sales Growth %] < 0 THEN "▼"
ELSE "●"
END

This formula is straightforward: if growth is positive, return an "up" arrow. If negative, return a "down" arrow. If it's zero, return a solid circle.

Step 2: Create a Calculated Field for Color

Next, create a field named Trend Color to control the arrow (and optionally the number).

IF [YoY Sales Growth %] > 0 THEN "Green"
ELSEIF [YoY Sales Growth %] < 0 THEN "Red"
ELSE "Gray"
END

Step 3: Bring It All Together in the View

Now, let's assemble this in your worksheet.

1. Clear the YoY Sales Growth % field from your Text mark.
2. Drag your new Trend Arrow calculated field to the Text mark.
3. Drag your original YoY Sales Growth % field and also place it on the Text mark.
4. Drag your Trend Color field to the Color mark.

At first, it will look a bit messy. Tableau just stacks text fields on top of each other. The final step is to edit the text arrangement.

1. Click on the Text mark to open the text editor.
2. Arrange the fields side-by-side however you like. For example: <Trend Arrow> <AGG(YoY Sales Growth %)>. This places the arrow next to the percentage.
3. Assign your colors. Click the Color mark card, select "Edit Colors,” and map "Green" to a green shade, "Red" to a red shade, and "Gray" to a gray shade.

The result is a nicely formatted label where the arrows and numbers are colored according to their trend direction, giving you much more visual appeal and clarity.

Improving the Format: Removing the Double Negative

You might notice that in the colored version, you have both a red down arrow AND a negative sign (e.g., ▼ -11.5%). This is redundant. To fix this, you can wrap your YoY Sales Growth % calculation with the ABS() function within the text label editor. This ABS() function returns the absolute (positive) version of a number.

Simply create one last calculated field called YoY Sales Growth Abs:

ABS([YoY Sales Growth %])

Then, replace your original growth metric with this one in the Text mark. Now your table will look much cleaner.

Best Practices for Using Indicator Arrows

• Maintain Consistency: Use the same arrow style and color logic across your entire workbook. If a green "up" arrow means "good" on one dashboard, it should mean the same thing everywhere.
• Consider Accessibility: Relying on color alone (like red vs. green) can be problematic for viewers with color blindness. Arrows are fantastic because they provide a shape-based indicator in addition to color, making them more universally understandable. Pairing symbols with color is always a win.
• Keep It Clean: The purpose of arrows is to simplify, not complicate. Use them for your most important metrics. Overloading a view with dozens of indicators can be as confusing as having no indicators at all.

Final Thoughts

Incorporating up and down arrows into your Tableau dashboards is a quick, high-impact technique to improve clarity and speed up a viewer's comprehension. Whether you use the simple custom number formatting method or the more flexible calculated field approach, these indicators help tell the story behind your data by immediately showing where things are heading.

These manual formatting steps and calculated fields are exactly the kind of friction we've removed with Graphed. Instead of creating multiple calculations and formatting labels, you just ask our AI data analyst a simple question like, “Show me sales by product compared to last year with up or down arrows.” We instantly create a live dashboard that answers your question without you needing to write a single formula or drag anything onto a marks card, giving you time back to focus on insights, not setup.