WOW2025 | Week 7 | Can you Manually Color a Highlight Table?

I’m honored to present another challenge as a WOW coach this year.
Being a coach last year was a great learning experience. It made me rethink whether my approach was truly the best and if the content was genuinely valuable for WOW participants.
I’m excited to continue this journey and thankful for the chance to contribute as a coach once again.

This week’s theme is highlight tables. They build on crosstabs by adding visual emphasis through color, making it easier to spot patterns and trends, which makes them an effective chart type. Since they feel like a natural extension of Excel, many people learn about them early when starting with Tableau.

Recently, I’ve received questions like, “I understand that highlight tables are useful, but can’t we easily color specific cells like in Excel?”

Manually coloring cells in a data-driven highlight table isn’t its intended use. However, in real-world scenarios, there could be times when you need to call attention to specific points in a table—whether to mark an important event, emphasize an outlier, or highlight key business metrics. One possible way to do this is by changing the cell color.

In this challenge, we will explore how to meet this need.
I hope you enjoy the challenge and discover something new along the way!