Building your First Advanced Dashboard
Creating dashboards with tableau is an interactive process, there isn’t a “one best method”. Starting with a basic concept, discoveries made along the way lead to design refinements. Feedback from your target audience provides the foundation for additional enhancements. With traditional BI tools, this is a time-consuming process. Tableau’s drop and drag ease of using facilities resulted in the rapid evolution of designs and also started encouraging discovery.
Introducing the dashboard worksheet
After creating multiple, complementary worksheets, you can combine them into an integrated view if the data is using the dashboard worksheet. Figure 8.8 shows an empty dashboard workspace.
The top-left half of the dashboard shelf displays all of the worksheets contained in the workbook. The bottom half of the same space provides access to another object controls for adding text, images, blank space, or live web pages in the dashboard workspace. The worksheets and other design objects are placed into the “drop sheets here” area. The bottom left dashboard area contains controls for specifying the size of the dashboard and a check box for adding a dashboard title.
The top-left half of the dashboard shelf displays all of the worksheets contained in the workbook. The bottom half of the same space provides access to another object controls for adding text, images, blank space, or live web pages in the dashboard workspace. The worksheets and other design objects are placed into the “drop sheets here” area. The bottom left dashboard area contains controls for specifying the size of the dashboard and a check box for adding a dashboard title.
You are going to step through the creation of a dashboard using the access database file that ships with tableau called coffee chain. You will create the dashboard by employing the best practices, recommended earlier in the post.
The example dashboard is suitable for a weekly or monthly recurring reports. The specifications have been defined and are demanding. The example utilizes a variety of visualizations, dashboard objects and actions. It will include a main dashboard and a secondary dashboard that will be linked together via filter actions.
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Figure 8.8: Tableau’s dashboard worksheet
Read through the rest of the post first to get an overview of the process. Then, step through each section and build the dashboard by yourself. When completed, your dashboard should look like figure 8.9
Read through the rest of the post first to get an overview of the process. Then, step through each section and build the dashboard by yourself. When completed, your dashboard should look like figure 8.9
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Figure 8.9: Completed coffee chain dashboard example
The dashboard follows the 4-pane layout recommended earlier in the best practices section of this post, but it is actually a 5-panel design with the small select year cross-tab acting as a filter via a filter action. The main dashboard in figure 8.9 includes a variety of worksheet panes, an image object with a logo, text objects, dynamic title elements, and a text object containing an active web link. The example, employs a cascading design that links the main dashboard to a secondary dashboard via a filter action. The secondary dashboard contains more granular data in a crosstab and an embedded webpage that is filtered by hovering your mouse over the crosstab. This example is designed to use many of tableau’s advanced dashboard features included in tableau desktop version 8 and were included in MINDMAJIX TABLEAU TRAINING. The major steps required to complete this example are:
The dashboard follows the 4-pane layout recommended earlier in the best practices section of this post, but it is actually a 5-panel design with the small select year cross-tab acting as a filter via a filter action. The main dashboard in figure 8.9 includes a variety of worksheet panes, an image object with a logo, text objects, dynamic title elements, and a text object containing an active web link. The example, employs a cascading design that links the main dashboard to a secondary dashboard via a filter action. The secondary dashboard contains more granular data in a crosstab and an embedded webpage that is filtered by hovering your mouse over the crosstab. This example is designed to use many of tableau’s advanced dashboard features included in tableau desktop version 8 and were included in MINDMAJIX TABLEAU TRAINING. The major steps required to complete this example are:
- Download the post “bringing it all together with dashboards” dashboard exercise workbook from the book’s companion website. Refer to Appendix C: “inter works book website” for additional details.
- Define the dashboard size and position the dashboard objects in the dashboard workspace.
- Enhance title elements, refine axis headers, and place image and text objects into the primary dashboard.
- Create a secondary dashboard with a detailed crosstab, webpage object and navigation pane.
- Add filter, highlight and URL actions to the dashboards.
- Finish the dashboard by enhancing the tooltips and testing all filtering and navigation. Add a read me dashboard to explain how the dashboard is intended to be used to data sources and for any calculations created that may not be obvious to the audience.
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