This is a great way to personalize your dashboards and your development experience. Sometimes the default options are not the way to go. So here’s a use case:

I recently vizzed some MLB stats to my Tableau Public profile. I took a look at the MLB run differential statistic for every professional baseball team going back to the 1957 season. I was able to plot a time series of baseball run differentials across the length of a season. In order to differentiate the lines plotted in the visualization, I decided to that it would be great to download MLB team logos to serve as filter icons for the visualization. Using the dashboard filter action, we can interact with the dashboard by clicking on a logo and filtering views.

Tableau software has some default shape types that can already be used. Adding specific shapes to your tool belt will provide a better experience for the user. Here are some quick and dirty steps to add your own images as shapes below:

• Download your chosen images that you would like to use
• Save to your ‘MyTableauRepository’ folder located in your My Documents folder; this folder should be created once you have downloaded your Tableau software
• Navigate to the Shapes folder and create a new folder for your set of shapes (in my scenario, I added MLB logo images to a baseball shapes folder)
• Once created and saved, you can then go to your Tableau software and Shape card in the Marks section; in the Edit Shape option, you can now Reload Shapes and the folder should now be available
• You can now assign the shapes to their respective data values that make sense; once assigned Tableau should memorize the assignments for the duration of building viz’s in your desktop session

These are great ways to make visuals more unique (scatterplots, line charts, etc.); they can also be used as dashboard filter actions when combining multiple views.

Let me know what types of images you have downloaded for your visuals, Thanks!