All in Tableau Dashboards
Sometimes, users need to see the same data multiple ways to develop thorough insights. Providing your user the ability to switch worksheet types (e.g. swap a map for a bar chart) is a great way to provide them with flexibility in analysis!
One of my favorite tricks in Tableau dashboarding is to allow users to swap worksheets! You can hook a parameter up to a calculation which filters/swaps between multiple sheets in a Tableau dashboard.
Users love text tables. No matter how much we steer them toward data visualizations that do a better job of exposing patterns, outliers and areas of interest, many users are still most comfortable viewing data in a table.
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One of my favorite solutions is to have the text table expand / appear when users make a selection and collapse / disappear when they deselect a value.
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.
Want to set up filters or parameters on your Tableau dashboard so they disappear or reappear based on a user selection? I ran into this scenario recently when working with a client. We had a handful of pre-set date ranges a user could select (e.g. Month to Date, This Quarter, etc.) but we also wanted to give the user the option to select a custom date range.
Sometimes when I’m creating summary tiles for Tableau dashboards, I like to add arrows or percent increases/decreases to let consumers know how current values relate to the comparison period.
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.
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.
I recently learned something crazy about Tableau. If you add a total to your worksheet and then try to filter another worksheet by selecting a total value, it doesn’t work! Maybe you’ve experienced this too and thought you were crazy. The unexpected solution to this problem is to add a separate total worksheet to a dashboard to use as a filter action. Tableau’s own documentation recommends this.
Last week, I published a blog post about the power of compound interest and embedded related a Tableau Public dashboard (also below).
Great! You have now hosted a successful Design Sprint session and mocked up some whiteboards everyone feels good about building. What are the steps you can now take to ensure your groundwork results in Tableau dashboards that are used by your audience?
Tooltips are one of those overlooked features in Tableau that can add so much value. One of my checklist items before publishing to Tableau Server is “Make sure tooltips look okay.” Generally I’m just making sure some wonky calculation I built or some run-on named table calculation isn’t showing up in the tooltip.
I teach classes on visual best practices so I know that it’s a bad idea to include more than 5-7 colors in a single visual display. Our short-term memory generally only allows us to keep track of up to 7 variables at a time. Ever had someone tell you their phone number only to immediately forget what they said or mix it up?
Want to quickly learn all the main topics you need to know about Tableau Parameters? Check out the webinar recording above!
I was working on a project recently and wanted an image in the dashboard to switch based on user selection. I remembered a colleague doing this six years ago and for the life of me couldn’t figure out how until checking out this section of the Tableau community forum.
Setting permissions appropriately in Tableau dashboards is key to maintaining data reporting integrity.
