All in Design
There are three certainties in life; death, taxes and running out of space on your dashboard.
We've all been there, right? Our business users want to squeeze "just one more sheet" onto an already crowded view. If that sheet is a bar chart, I've got a space saving tip for you. Could you overlay the dimensional labels at the beginning of the bars to save some space?
Does your dashboard feel cluttered because you're trying to communicate too much supporting information to your user? Making sure you cover everything your user needs to know can leave your output feeling more like an essay than a data-driven dashboard.
Info buttons are a staple of Tableau dashboards. They allow you to pack so much additional information to a dashboard without cluttering the view for users.
Tableau is a powerful analytical tool, but learning its ins and outs can feel daunting. Whether you are a first time user, shaking off some rust, or trying to get a colleague up to speed, this video is designed to give an overview of the Tableau interface and get a user comfortable with creating worksheets, calculations and dashboards.
Highlight tables are one of my all-time favorite Tableau visuals. You can pack so much information into a limited space. One of the only weaknesses of highlight tables is that they usually display every label (too cluttered) or no labels (too bare). Most users are looking for a specific insight. Maybe the want to focus attention on the highest values, lowest values, or top N.
“Can Tableau do conditional formatting?”
Lots of new Tableau users, especially with Excel skills, want to know if they can use Tableau like Excel. Tableau isn’t really designed like Excel. It’s not intended for data input, but rather data preparation and visualization. That said, a lot of features you might be used to from Excel like highlighting cells or highlighting rows of values are possible!
So let’s say you built a worksheet in Tableau and the row labels aren’t repeating for every row in the table. For example, maybe a year or quarter field is only showing up once instead of repeating.
Having a lot of zeroes in a crosstab or highlight table can be clunky and visually overwhelming. Lots of zeros can divert your users' attention away from actual data values because the visual looks cluttered.
So you’re building a pie chart, huh? You’ve ignored all the naysayers and pie chart haters and you’re going to build it anyways. Good for you!
First off, let me give a huge shoutout to my colleague Klaudia for inspiring this post. She put together a dashboard format for a client we work for and I found it to look so sharp that I’ve adopted it for my own uses!
If you are looking for some inspiration for how you can make your Tableau business dashboards more visually intuitive, you’ll want to check this out! I walk through all the design steps in the video below.
Have you ever run into a situation in Tableau where you add labels to the ends of your lines, only to find out those labels are overlapping the lines and are borderline illegible?
Have you ever noticed how axes in Tableau worksheets are always at the bottom? That can feel counterintuitive to end users. They have to go all the way to the bottom of the worksheet and read the axes to determine what the worksheet is trying to communicate.
I was recently reading the book Principles by Ray Dalio (who founded one of the largest hedge funds in the world). He has an interesting mind and displayed a chart for visualizing data over time series, ranking values against each other. He mentioned that good thinkers are generally able to identify and visualize trends well. His chart looked something like this.
I provide summary tiles at the top of most dashboards I build to provide easy-to-find, bite-size information for my end users. There are a couple primary approaches to creating summary tiles in Tableau and a few tricks you can utilize to make them look crisp.
In Excel, you can easily highlight an entire row in a spreadsheet by selecting a row and adding fill to the background of the cells. How about Tableau however? Tableau highlight tables get you close, but one of their shortcoming is they don’t highlight the background of dimensional headers.
I recently received an email from a blog reader who was trying to solve a problem I’ve come across several times. He was representing populations on a map of the world in a chart that looked something like this.
I recently saw some visuals built in a non-Tableau data visualization tool (not sure which one) that were utilizing emojis in dimension labels. I thought it was a fun way to mix up the standard labeling and text tables we usually see.
