How to Create a Candlestick Chart in Tableau

A candlestick chart can tell you the entire story of a stock's performance in a single glance - the opening and closing price, the daily high and low, and whether the market was optimistic or pessimistic. If you're working with stock market data, crypto prices, or any time-series data with open-high-low-close (OHLC) values, Tableau can transform that raw data into these powerfully insightful visualizations. This tutorial provides a complete step-by-step guide to building a professional candlestick chart from scratch in Tableau.

What is a Candlestick Chart?

Before we build one, let’s quickly break down its components. A candlestick chart is a type of financial chart used to describe price movements of a security, derivative, or currency. Each "candle" typically represents one day (or another time interval) and is made of two main parts:

• The Body: The wide part of the candlestick, which shows the range between the opening and closing price. The color of the body indicates the price direction, green (or white) usually means the closing price was higher than the opening price (a "bullish" or up day), while red (or black) means the close was lower than the open (a "bearish" or down day).
• The Wick (or Shadow): The thin lines extending above and below the body. These show the highest and lowest prices reached during the time period. The top of the upper wick is the high, and the bottom of the lower wick is the low.

By combining this information, you can quickly spot volatility, market sentiment, and potential trend reversals in your data, far more effectively than with a simple line chart.

Preparing Your Data for Tableau

Tableau needs your data to be in a specific format to build a candlestick chart. Your data source, whether it's an Excel file, a CSV, or a database connection, must contain at least the following five columns:

• Date: A column for the time dimension.
• Open: The opening price.
• High: The highest price during the interval.
• Low: The lowest price during the interval.
• Close: The closing price.

Your raw data should look something like this:

Date,Open,High,Low,Close,Volume 1/2/2023,130.28,130.90,124.17,125.07,112117500 1/3/2023,124.27,130.89,124.17,130.74,84635800 1/4/2023,126.89,128.66,125.08,126.36,89113600 1/5/2023,127.12,127.77,124.76,125.02,80962700

With your data properly structured, you’re ready to connect it to Tableau and start building the chart.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Candlestick Chart in Tableau

This process relies heavily on clever use of calculated fields and Tableau's dual-axis functionality to layer the body and wicks of the candle on top of each other. Let's walk through it.

Step 1: Connect to Your Data Source

First, open Tableau and connect to your dataset. From the Connect pane, choose the appropriate file type (like Microsoft Excel or Text File) and select your prepared data file.

Step 2: Create the Main Structure (The Wicks)

We'll start by building the thin lines that represent the full range from the day's low to its high.

1. Drag your Date field from the Data pane onto the Columns shelf. Right-click the Date pill and ensure it is set to Day and is also Continuous (it should be green).
2. Drag your Low measure to the Rows shelf.
3. In the Marks card, change the dropdown from 'Automatic' to Gantt Bar. At this point, you'll see small tick marks for each Low value. Now we need to tell Tableau how long to make an upward bar from that starting point.
4. Create a calculated field to define the size of this bar. Go to Analysis > Create Calculated Field.... Name it HL Range (for High-Low Range) and enter the following formula:
5. Drag this new HL Range calculated field from the Measures pane directly onto the Size button on the Marks card.

You should now see lines that start at each day's low price and extend up to its high price. These are our wicks! You can click on the Size button and drag the slider to the left to make these lines thinner, which is a good idea for a clean look.

Step 3: Create the Body of the Candles

Next, we need to create and overlay the candle bodies. This will involve using a dual-axis chart.

1. First, create a calculated field that will serve as the starting point for the body. The bottom of the candle's body is always the minimum of the Open and Close price. Name this field OC Level (for Open-Close Level) with the formula:
2. Now, drag your new OC Level measure onto the Rows shelf, to the right of your SUM(Low) pill. You will see two separate charts appear.
3. Right-click the OC Level pill on the Rows shelf and select Dual Axis. This overlaps the two charts.
4. To keep everything in scale, right-click one of the axes in the chart view and select Synchronize Axis.

Step 4: Resize and Color the Body

Now we have to work on the Marks card for our OC Level chart to turn it into a colored body.

1. On the Marks card shelf, you now have tabs for SUM(Low) and AGG(OC Level). Click on the AGG(OC Level) tab to modify this layer.
2. The mark type should already be a Gantt Bar. We need to define its size, which is the difference between the open and close price. Create another calculated field named OC Range (for Open-Close Range) with the formula:
3. Drag this new OC Range calculated field to the Size button on the AGG(OC Level) Marks card. You should now see thick bars appear over your thin wicks. Use the size slider to make these thicker than your wicks for the classic candlestick look.
4. Finally, let's add color. We need to tell Tableau to color the body based on whether the price went up or down. Create one last calculated field named Price Change:
5. Drag the Price Change field from the Dimensions pane to the Color button on the AGG(OC Level) Marks card.
6. Click the Color button to edit the colors. Assign a shade of green to "Up" and a shade of red to "Down" to match standard financial charting conventions.

Step 5: Final Touches and Formatting

Your candlestick chart is now functionally complete! The last step is cleaning it up for a professional presentation.

• Clean Up Tooltips: Hover over a candle. The default tooltip might be confusing. Click on the Tooltip button on each of the Marks cards (SUM(Low) and AGG(OC Level)) and edit the text to clearly display static labels and dynamic values for Open, High, Low, and Close.
• Hide the Second Axis: One of your vertical axes is now redundant. Right-click the axis on the right side and uncheck Show Header.
• Finalize Your Titles: Edit the chart title and the remaining axis title to clearly describe what is being displayed (e.g., "AAPL Stock Price" and "Price (USD)").

Advanced Candlestick Chart Enhancements

Once you've mastered the basic chart, you can layer on more information for even deeper analysis.

Add Trading Volume

It's common to display trading volume beneath a candlestick chart. The easiest way to do this is to create a separate worksheet just for volume.

1. On a new sheet, drag your Date field to Columns (Continuous Day).
2. Drag your Volume measure to Rows.
3. Change the Marks type to Bar.
4. On a new Dashboard, drag both your Candlestick Chart sheet and your Volume sheet onto the canvas, placing the volume chart directly below the candlestick chart. Make sure the date axes line up perfectly.

Add a Moving Average

Moving averages help smooth out price data to identify long-term trends.

1. Go back to your candlestick chart sheet.
2. Drag your Close measure to the AGG(OC Level) axis in the view. Tableau will add it as another layered measure.
3. You will see a Measure Names pill appear on the AGG(OC Level) marks card on the Color, Size, and other properties shelves. Remove it to avoid confusion.
4. You should now see three mark shelves (SUM(Low), AGG(OC Level), and AGG(Close)).
5. On the card AGG(Close), change mark type to line.
6. Right-click the AGG(Close) pill on the Rows shelf, and select Add Table Calculation.
7. For Calculation Type, select Moving Calculation. Customize the settings to your desired moving average, such as Average over the previous 10 days. You now have a moving average line overlaid on your chart.

Final Thoughts

Though they look complex, creating candlestick charts in Tableau is a very manageable process once you understand the logic behind using calculated fields and a dual axis. This visualization unlocks far deeper insights into time-series data, helping you quickly spot patterns of volatility and sentiment that a simple line chart would completely hide.

While building custom charts in tools like Tableau offers incredible control, the setup can be time-consuming. We built Graphed to eliminate this manual work and make data analysis conversational. Instead of creating calculated fields and configuring dual-axes, you can just connect your sources and ask, “show me a candlestick chart of Bitcoin prices for the last 6 months.” We instantly generate shareable, live-updating charts and dashboards so you can get right to the insights in seconds. Get started with Graphed for free.