Building Interactive Dashboards

Unit 4

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Combining multiple visualizations into a dashboard
• Tableau has made it easy to create amazing visualization from your
data. Its simple drag-and-drop interface allows you to create fully
inactive dashboards that can be shared with anyone.
• Whatever dashboard you're going to build in Tableau. We have to
consider four important questions for every single dashboard.
• Firstly who. Who is your target audience for this dashboard? Is it going
to be you? Is it going to be your department? Is it going to be the
general public? Understanding who the final viewer of your dashboard
is critical.
• Secondly, where is that audience member actually going to view your
dashboard? Is it going to be a desktop machine? Is it going to be on
their tablet? Understanding where impacts things like the dashboard
size.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Cont…
• Third Why? Why are we building this dashboard in the first
place? What is the purpose of that dashboard?
• Finally what? What is the final one? Because depending on the other
three answers, we then can think about what elements do we want to
include? What do we want to exclude?
• The answers that we give to these questions is going to guide our
design process. Every element that we add, or remove to our
dashboard, we can think about how that reflects in the 4 Ws.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

 Let us design a Tableau Dashboard using the Sample -
Superstore data set comes with Tableau. It contains
information about products, sales, profits, and so on
that you can use to identify key areas for improvement
within the fictitious company.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Step 1 : Design Sheet ‘Sales in South’
• From the Data pane, drag Order Date to the Columns shelf.
• From the Data pane, drag Sales to the Rows shelf.
• From the Data pane, drag Category to the Columns shelf and place it
to the right of YEAR(Order Date). Create a hierarchy with subcategory.
• Drag Subcategory to color mark
• Drag Order Date to filter pane and select any specific year whose
sales you want to view.
• Drag Region in the Filter pane and select only south region to explore

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Prof. Esmita Gupta
 Step 2: Explore your data geographically
• In the Data pane, double-click State to add it to Detail on the Marks
card.
• Drag Region to the Filters shelf, and then filter down to the South only.
The map view zooms in to the South region, and there is a mark for
each state
• Drag the Sales measure to Color on the Marks card.
• Click Color on the Marks card and select Edit Colors.
• Drag Profit to Color on the Marks card and on the Label of the mark
card

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Prof. Esmita Gupta
 Step 3: Drill down into the details
• Duplicate worksheets of Step 2 and Drill down to get more details and save your changes to
continue exploring your data in different ways.
• Double-click Sheet 3 and name the worksheet Profit Map regionwise.
• In this sheet click Show Me, and then select horizontal bars.
• Multi-select the bars on the left by clicking on one bar and press control key and select through
your cursor across the bars which you want to keep.
• You can also right-click one or more of the highlighted bars, and select Keep Only.
• Notice that an Inclusions field for State is added to the Filters shelf to indicate that certain states
are filtered from the view. The icon with two circles on the field indicates that this field is a set. You
can edit this field by right-clicking the field on the Filters shelf and selecting, Edit Filter.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

• On the Rows shelf, click the plus icon on the State field to drill-down to the City level of detail.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

 Step 4: Create a Top N Filter
1.From the Data pane, drag City to the Filters shelf.
2.In the Filter dialog box, select the Top tab, and then do the following:
1. Click By field.
2. Click the Top drop-down and select Top to reveal the best performers.
3. Type 5 in the text box to show the bottom 5 performers in your data set.
• NOTE: Tableau Desktop has already selected a field (Profit) and aggregation (Sum) for the Top N Filter
based on the fields in your view. These settings ensure that your view will display only the five best
performing cities by sum of profit.
3. Click OK.
4. On the Filters shelf, right-click the Inclusions
(Country, State) (Country, State) set and
select Add to Context.
The Inclusions (Country, State) (Country, State) set
turns gray and moves to the top of the Filters shelf.
Prof. Esmita Gupta
Prof. Esmita Gupta
Step 5: Set up your dashboard

• Now, you have created 4 worksheets. Lets communicate all the

information to our authority at one glance, by preparing a Dashboard.
• Click the New dashboard button.

• From the Dashboard pane on the left, drag one by one all the
sheets to your empty dashboard and rearrange as you want.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Prof. Esmita Gupta
Arrange your dashboard
• On Sales in the South, right-click in the column area under
the Region column header, and clear Show header.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

• Right-click the Profit Map title and select Hide
Title.
• Repeat this step for other titles of the individual
sheets.
• Select the first Sub-Category filter card on the right
side of your view, and at the top of the card, click
the Remove icon .
• Click on the Profit color legend and drag it from
the right to below Top N Profit. And similarly drag
others filters also

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Prof. Esmita Gupta
• Click the drop-down arrow at the top of the Year of Order Date filter,
and select Single Value (Slider).
• Click the drop-down arrow at the top of the Sub-Category and select
Multi values (drop down)
• Remove not required headers from the dashboard.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

 Add interactivity
• To view which sub-categories are profitable in specific states?
• Select Profit Map in the dashboard and click the Use as filter icon in the
upper right-hand corner.
• Select a state within the map.
• The Sales in the South bar chart automatically updates to show just the
sub-category sales in the selected state. You can quickly see which sub-
categories are profitable.
• Click outside of the U.S. to clear your selection.

Prof. Esmita Gupta

• Now, select on any state bar of the visual you will be able to see the
changes on the other views too.
(if you want to see multiple states press ctrl key and select the bars.)

Prof. Esmita Gupta

1. Select the Year of Order
Date filter, click its drop-down
arrow, and select Apply to
Worksheets > Selected
Worksheets.
2. In the Apply Filter to Worksheets
dialog box, select All in
dashboard, and then click OK.
3. This option tells Tableau to apply
the filter to all worksheets in the
dashboard that use this same
data source.
4. Select different years and see
the changes.
5. The same can be done for Sub-
Categories.
Prof. Esmita Gupta
Build a story to present
• You want to share your findings with the larger team. Together, you
might reevaluate selling machines in North Carolina.
• Instead of having to guess which key insights your team is interested
in, and including them in a PowerPoint presentation, you can decide to
create a story in Tableau.
• This way, you can walk viewers through your data discovery process,
and you have the option to interactively explore your data to answer
any questions that come up during your presentation

Prof. Esmita Gupta

Create your first story point
1.Click the New story button

2.From the Story pane on the left, drag the Sales in the South worksheet onto
your view.

3.Add a caption—maybe "Sales and profit by year for machines"—by editing

the text in the gray box above the worksheet.
Prof. Esmita Gupta
Prof. Esmita Gupta
 Make your point
• The bottom line is that machines in NC lose your company money. You
discovered that in the dashboard you created. Looking at overall sales and
profit by year doesn't demonstrate this point alone, but regional profit can.
To prove your point you can create one more blank story point on the same
story board.
• Drag your dashboard Regional Sales and Profit onto the canvas.
• Add a caption like, "Underperforming items in the South."
• To narrow your results to just North Carolina, start with a duplicate story
point.
1.Select Duplicate to create another story point with your Regional Profit
dashboard.
2.Select North Carolina on the map and notice that the bar chart
automatically updates.
3.Select All on the Year of Order Date filter card.
4.Add a caption, for example, "Profit in NC, 2014-2017."
Prof. Esmita Gupta
Just for Example

Prof. Esmita Gupta