Program 4 :
Dashboard Design and Storytelling – Components of Dashboard, Understanding how to place
worksheets in Containers, Action filters and its types.
CREATING A STORY WITH TABLEAU PUBLIC
With Tableau public, you are able to organize your data in order to tell a meaningful story. This is
beneficial when you are doing a presentation, creating an article, or uploading to a website, as it helps your
audience understand your data.
Stories are created through assembling the different worksheets and dashboards. We can highlight important
data points, add text box and pictures to help convey our story. However, there are many different ways to
tell a story. For example, one technique is called “tailoring in” where the story starts with a big picture view
and zooms in on a specific detail.
In contrast, a story can also be told by starting with a case and zooming out to that big picture view. We are
going to return to our health expenditure worksheets to create a tailoring in story and illustrate the changes
in Canada’s spending in a meaningful way.
To begin, select “New Story” at the bottom right of your screen.
Drag “Sheet 1” and “Sheet 2” on to “Drag a sheet here”. We can rename each storyboard by clicking “Add a
caption”. Rename Sheet 1 to “Provincial Health Expenditure in 2016”.
Use the arrows located on the side of the caption field to navigate to Sheet 2. Click on “Add a
caption” and rename Sheet 2 to “Provincial Health Expenditure from 1975-2018”.
In this story, we are going to narrow in and draw attention to the province or territory that is
spending the most amount of money on health. Drag an additional copy of “Sheet 1” and drop it
between the two existing sheets. Select “Add a caption” and rename it to “Ontario”.
On the map, click on the province Ontario and then navigate to the caption field andselect “Update”. Your
screen will show Ontario highlighted from the rest of Canada
Select the right arrow to navigate to “Provincial Health Expenditure from 1975-2018”. Hover over
the line representing Ontario and select the data point representing health expenditure during the year
2016. Then click “Update”. Your screen should look like this:
We can add a textbox to label the highlighted pointed by dragging “Drag to add text” onto the line
graph. Write a key message in the textbox, such as “Ontario had the highest health expenditure in
Canada in 2016, spending $87,195.70M”. Select “OK”.
You can the edit the text box by selecting “More options” which will open a drop-downmenu.
Expand the text box by dragging the borders in order to show the full message.
We have now created a story with three sheets of how Ontario had the highest health expenditure
in the year 2016. If you choose to add a dashboard, it will allow your audience to play with data.
You can navigate between the story as shown below:
SAVING AND PUBLISHING YOUR TABLEAU PUBLIC WORKBOOK
Once satisfied with your workbook, which includes sheets, dashboards, and stories, you can
publish it to the Tableau Public website. This is the only way to save your work whenusing
Tableau Public, so make sure to do it if you wish to return to the workbook in the future.
Once ready to publish, select the “Save to Tableau Public As…” option under the “File”tab.
CREATING A DASHBOARD WITH TABLEAU
Dashboards are a great way to combine your data visualizations and have them interact with one
another. A lot of businesses use dashboards to keep up-to-date in real time about key performance
indicators at a glance. In this example, we will combine just two of our data visualizations, the map
and the line graph from the first section of the tutorial, but in reality, it can be used to combine
many visualizations at once.
The first step in creating your dashboard is to open up the Dashboard tab at the bottom of the screen:
After clicking this icon, your screen should open to this:
This is your Dashboard Sheet. On the left side you can see that there is a list of the sheets you have
made from your current data source.
To build your dashboard, drag the sheet you want in to the center where it says Drop sheets here.
For our purposes, we will need to drag Sheet 1 and Sheet 2 where the mapand line graph are saved.
When you drag, you will notice an area of your screen will shade over where your graph will drop
when you put it down. Organize your dashboardto look like the following:
Now to add titles to the graphs that were chosen, double click on the automatic titles generated
based on the sheet name, and a new window should appear, type in a titlethat describes the graph
like so:
We can also add additional titles and objects to the dashboard by choosing an object from the
Objects side panel and dragging it to the dashboard. We are going to add titlesto the bottom line
graph to differentiate between the Canada line and the provinces. To do this, drag
to the area near the orange line that corresponds to the sumof all provinces
expenditure throughout the years. Type in “Canada”. Drag
once more to label the remaining provinces. Your bottom graph should look like this:
Now, to add an interactive layer between the graphs, we can choose a graph that can actas a filter
to the other. We will choose the line graph to act as a filter to the map. To do this, click on the
line graph and a grey sidebar should appear. From this bar, click the filter icon to use this graph
as a filter:
Now, when you click a given line, it will be highlighted on the above map:
Congrats, now you have an interactive dashboard that is ready to be published or saved!