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.
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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.
Highlight actions provide a powerful way to tie together related information in Tableau dashboards.
After creating a parameter that lets you swap worksheets in a Tableau dashboard, one of the problems is that when a worksheet goes blank (because it is swapped away from), the color legends associated with that worksheet also temporarily go blank.
Figuring out what to do with filters in a Tableau dashboard can be a headache. You don’t want them to take up too much screen real estate but want them to look nice and be intuitive. Getting them all to be the same size can be a hassle. Here are some tricks I use to help everything come together.
One of the challenges of busy dashboards in Tableau is that it can be hard to tell if a filter has been applied.
Imagine you’ve run into a scenario where you want to be able to show a little more information on your dashboard but it makes it feel too cluttered. However, it’s not nearly enough extra information that it warrants creating an entirely separate dashboard. This is a great opportunity to use a little known feature in Tableau that allows you to expand and contract worksheets in a dashboard.
URL actions open up a new world of possibilities in Tableau dashboards. You can link to a URL field, look up a data point of interest, or even create an action that creates an email form. URL actions have been used to successfully linked sales opportunities to Salesforce, link furniture companies to their products on the web and generate emails to further discussion about data points of interest.
Occasionally, you’ll come across scenarios in Tableau where you need more than the stock shapes that Tableau provides.