How to Show Summary Card in Tableau Dashboard

A great dashboard gives you the most important numbers at a glance, and nothing does that better than a big, bold summary card. This simple-but-powerful element cuts through the noise of detailed charts to put your key performance indicators (KPIs) front and center. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to create a summary card in Tableau, from building a basic metric display to adding smart visual cues that tell a deeper story.

What is a Summary Card and Why Should You Use One?

A summary card, sometimes called a KPI card or a BAN (Big A** Number), is a visualization designed to do one thing: display a single, critical metric as clearly as possible. Think of them as the headline numbers for your dashboard. Before a user dives into a complex line chart or a detailed bar graph, summary cards give them the high-level takeaway instantly.

You should use summary cards because they:

• Provide immediate clarity: They answer the most basic, important questions first. What were our total sales? How many new users did we get? What's our current conversion rate?
• Draw user attention: Their large size and prime placement on a dashboard naturally guide the viewer to the most important information.
• Set the stage for deeper analysis: They act as a starting point. Seeing a surprisingly low revenue number on a summary card encourages users to explore the other charts on the dashboard to understand why that number is low.

A row of three or four well-designed summary cards at the top of your dashboard is one of the most effective ways to communicate performance quickly and orient your audience.

Building Your First Basic Summary Card (Step-by-Step)

Let's build a simple summary card for "Total Sales" using Tableau's sample Superstore dataset. The best practice is to build each dashboard element on its own dedicated worksheet first.

Step 1: Create a new worksheet

This keeps your project organized and makes it much easier to assemble and adjust your dashboard later. Go ahead and name this new worksheet something clear, like "Sales KPI Card".

Step 2: Add your measure to the Text Card

This is the core of the summary card. Find the measure you want to display in the data pane on the left - in our case, the Sales measure. Instead of dragging it to Rows or Columns, drag and drop it directly onto the Text card in the Marks pane.

You'll immediately see a number appear in your canvas. This is the sum of all sales in your dataset. It's a start, but it doesn't look like a dashboard-ready summary card just yet.

Step 3: Format the number for clarity

Raw numbers are messy. Let's clean it up. Right-click the SUM(Sales) pill you just dropped on the Text card and select Format. A Format pane will open on the left side of your screen.

Under the "Default" section, click on Numbers. Choose Currency (Custom) and adjust the settings to your liking. For a high-level sales number, you might want to set Decimal places to 0 and Display Units to Thousands (K) or Millions (M) to keep it clean and easy to read.

Step 4: Adjust the fit and alignment

By default, the number is probably tucked into the top-left corner. We want it big, bold, and centered.

First, find the dropdown menu that says "Standard" in the toolbar and change it to "Entire View". This tells Tableau to let your component fill whatever space it's given on the dashboard.

Next, click on the Text card again. In the editor that pops up, go to the Alignment settings and choose the center options for both Horizontal and Vertical alignment. Now your number should be perfectly centered in the view.

Step 5: Edit the Text to add a label

A number without a label is useless. We need to tell the user what they're looking at. Click the Text card one more time, and this time, click on the small button with three dots (...) next to "Text". This opens the full Text Editor.

You'll see something like <SUM(Sales)>. This is Tableau's placeholder for the value. You can add your own text and formatting right here. Try this:

Type "Total Sales" above the placeholder. Make the "Total Sales" text a smaller font size (like size 12) and a lighter color (like gray). Then, make the <SUM(Sales)> placeholder larger (size 22 or higher) and bold. This creates a clear visual hierarchy. Click Apply to see your changes.

And that's it! You have a fully functional summary card ready to be placed on a dashboard.

Adding Context to Your Summary Card

A single number is useful, but a number with context is far more insightful. Is $2.3 million in sales good or bad? Compared to what? You can answer these questions by adding a comparison indicator to your card, like a year-over-year growth percentage.

Creating this requires a few calculated fields, but it's well worth the effort.

Step 1: Create calculated fields for This Year and Last Year Sales

To compare performance, you need to isolate numbers from different time periods. We can do this with two simple calculated fields.

• Go to Analysis > Create Calculated Field...
• Name the first one "This Year Sales".

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

This formula tells Tableau to only return sales figures for the most recent year in the dataset. The {} curly brackets create a FIXED Level of Detail expression, ensuring it always finds the absolute max year in the whole dataset.

Create a second calculated field named "Last Year Sales".

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

This is the same logic, but it pulls sales from the year before the most recent year.

Step 2: Create a calculated field for the period-over-period change

Now that we have both numbers, we can calculate the percentage change between them.

• Create a new calculated field named "YoY Sales Growth".

(SUM([This Year Sales]) - SUM([Last Year Sales])) / SUM([Last Year Sales])

Right-click this new calculated field in the data pane, go to Default Properties > Number Format... and set it to Percentage to ensure it always displays correctly.

Step 3: Create indicators for direction and color

This is where the magic happens. We'll use a calculated field to show an up or down arrow based on whether the growth is positive or negative.

• Create another calculated field named "Growth Arrow". You can find up and down arrow characters by copying and pasting them from a Google search ("up arrow character").

IF [YoY Sales Growth] > 0 THEN "▲" ELSE "▼" END

While we're at it, let's make another field that tells Tableau how to color the arrow.

• Create one final calculated field named "Growth Color".

IF [YoY Sales Growth] > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END

By using numbers (1 and 0), we can easily assign one color to "positive" and another to "negative".

Step 4: Put it all together on the Text card

Now, let's assemble our advanced summary card.

1. Clear out your previous worksheet. Instead of SUM(Sales), drag SUM(This Year Sales) onto the Text card. Format it just like you did before.
2. Drag YoY Sales Growth onto the Text card.
3. Drag Growth Arrow onto the Text card.
4. Drag Growth Color onto the Color card in the Marks pane.
5. Click the Color card, then Edit Colors. It should see 1 and 0 as the two values. Assign a bright green to 1 (positive) and red to 0 (negative).
6. Finally, click the Text card (...) editor to arrange all your elements. You can lay them out cleanly, assigning colors font sizes appropriately. For instance, color your arrow with the Growth Color field. It might look something like this inside the editor:

This Year's Sales <SUM(This Year Sales)> <AGG(Growth Arrow)> <AGG(YoY Sales Growth)> vs. Last Year

After formatting, your contextual summary card should clearly show the main KPI as well as a colored icon and percentage showing its performance against a prior period.

Assembling Your Cards on a Dashboard

Once you've built a worksheet for each of your KPI cards, bringing them onto a dashboard is simple.

1. Create a new dashboard.
2. To keep things organized, first drag a Horizontal container object from the left pane onto your empty dashboard canvas.
3. Now, drag your KPI worksheet (e.g., "Sales KPI Card") from the Sheets list and drop it inside the container. As you add more KPI card worksheets to the container, they'll line up neatly side-by-side.
4. Right-click the title of each worksheet on the dashboard and select Hide Title since we already built the title into the card itself.
5. You can adjust padding and add borders via the Layout tab to give your cards distinct outlines and create separation between them.

Quick Tips for Awesome Summary Cards

• Keep them simple. Resist the urge to add too much information. A summary card shines when it has a primary metric and, at most, a single comparison point.
• Use them as filters. Turn your summary cards into interactive buttons. On your dashboard, go to Dashboard > Actions > Add Action > Filter. You can set it up so that when a user clicks the "Sales" card, it filters all other charts to show only sales-related data.
• Be consistent. Make sure all the summary cards on your dashboard follow the same design language: same font sizes, same alignment, and the same way of showing comparison data. Consistency makes the dashboard easier and faster for your brain to process.

Final Thoughts

Summary cards are a fundamental building block of any strong analytics dashboard. By presenting your most important numbers clearly at the top, you give your audience an immediate understanding of business performance. While the initial setup in a tool like Tableau requires a series of steps and calculated fields, the resulting clarity is invaluable for driving data-informed decisions.

The entire process of building reports - creating calculated fields, arranging visualizations, and assembling dashboards - can feel tedious when you just want a quick answer. We built Graphed to remove those tedious manual steps. Rather than building summary cards and setting up metric comparisons manually, you can simply ask questions in plain English like, "Show me our total sales this year with the YoY growth," and it will instantly generate the dashboard cards and charts you need, all connected to your live data sources.