Progress toward a goal is a powerful way to motivate stakeholders toward achievements. Tableau is a great tool to help visualize progress toward a goal using reference lines, highlight tables, donut charts and custom images.
All in Tableau How-Tos
You’ve probably seen one of those graphs where a thermometer gets filled in to demonstrate progress toward a goal. They are popular on fundraising sites. It’s possible to create that same kind of visual in Tableau but requires a little ingenuity.
Imagine you are asked the question, “How do this month’s sales compare to this same period from last year?” The simplest way to address this in Tableau would be to create some calculations.
Tools like Excel and Google sheets give you the ability to create line graphs which can distinguish lines not only with different colors, but with different shapes. You can see in the chart below there is a yellow solid-line, a red dashed-line and a blue dotted-line.
I’ve always been interested in history. World history, local history, family history, you name it. About a decade ago I spent time researching and building my family tree on geni.com. I had a good experience and it was a helpful resource. I was able to build my family tree far enough back that I found out that (supposedly) I’m distantly related to the explorer Sir Francis Drake and William the Conqueror, king of England. Who knows how reliable family trees are 10 to 25 generations back however, hah!
Summary tiles are a great way to quickly communicate a few meaningful measures to your end users in a dashboard. Adding indicator arrows and allowing the colors of the summary tile to change can make them even more impactful.
If you are coming to Tableau from Excel you are probably familiar with nested if statements. Nested IF statements occur when you have multiple criteria that need to be satisfied to return a certain output. Tableau’s if statements are a little different than other tools.
If you use Tableau and work for a public facing agency, it’s likely you need to create some content that is available for public consumption. In many circumstances, it’s unlawful to display data for sample sizes below a certain headcount.
If you’ve been reading the OneNumber blog for a while, you likely saw a post last year about using the Set Action feature to create asymmetric drill downs.
As a Tableau dashboard designer, I’m trying to always keep in mind that the end user of my products might not be familiar with Tableau. One of the things that makes Tableau different than other tools is its interactivity.
On a number of occasions, I’ve been asked if Tableau can use a top filter to show the top percent of a population. For instance, some varieties of that questions has been…
There are a number of scenarios where you may want to build a dashboard that anonymizes the names/personalized information of everyone except the active user.
Warning! Proceed at your own risk. Before I go any further I should say that this is going to be a wild post with a lot of moving parts. I think a donut chart with a reference line is a really fun and different visual, but it’s only going to work in select circumstances.
In the Tableau world, donut charts sometimes get a bad reputation just like pie charts. The reason basically boils down to humans being less adept at comparing angles of a circle than length or a line or bar. That said, I have a soft spot (pun intended) for donut(s) (charts).
Imagine you are looking at a Tableau visual and want to to view the data translated into your local time zone. Transactions take place all over the country in different time zones but you’d like to see them all in local Pacific Time (for instance).
Want to quickly learn all the main topics you need to know about Tableau Parameters? Check out the webinar recording above!