Want to cut the number of sheets you need in your KPI dashboard in half? These 11 simple steps will get much closer.
Steal the calcs to speed up your work.
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In this Tableau tutorial, I guide you step-by-step through creating a daily sales dashboard that covers all critical time frames: Year to Date (YTD), Quarter to Date (QTD), Month to Date (MTD), Week to Date (WTD), and Today.
Learn how to calculate these metrics and compare them to previous periods, allowing for a dynamic view of your sales trends. This tutorial is perfect for sales managers, analysts, and anyone looking to gain insights from their sales data.
What You'll Learn:
- How to set up a simple daily sales dashboard in Tableau
- Calculating metrics for YTD, QTD, MTD, WTD, and Today
- Comparing these metrics to previous periods to identify trends
- Tips and tricks to make your dashboard visually appealing.
No prior experience with Tableau is required.
I guide you through the process with clear and simple explanations.
In this video we'll build a dynamic Tableau dashboard from scratch in just 10 minutes. We'll create a sales dashboard for Superstore’s European region.
1️⃣ We’ll create all of the charts which include a map, bar chart, line chart, and KPIs.
2️⃣ We’ll customize the charts to fit our style.
3️⃣ We’ll place the charts on the dashboard using layout containers, padding, formatting and more.
4️⃣ We’ll add interactivity to the dashboard to make for a great user experience.
DOWNLOAD the data and starter and solution workbooks (this covers the costs of making this and future videos):
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In this tip, I going to show you how to build 3 different KPI cards for measuring day over day change. In just a few steps, I’ll show you how to calculate:
Sales for the most recent day
Sales for the previous day
Difference in sales between those two dates
Percent difference in sales between those two dates
I'll then show you how to create these 3 different methods for displaying the KPIs so that you can create those that are most useful for your audience.
RESOURCES
Data - https://data.world/vizwiz/sample-car-sales
Month over Month Change - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViD3vclgNv8
Year over Year Change - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxYr4_l2ww
In this session, I worked on Back to Viz Basics (#B2VB) week 4 and designed as many KPIs as I could in an hour. The video and workbook are below the resources and links.
This week at The Data School, I was teaching DS24 about dashboard best practices and how to effectively use containers. We picked a visualization from the wild (this one by Ryan Sleeper) as an example for us to rebuild and to learn about effective use of containers.
If you'd like to learn more, here are two videos I produced about mastering containers:
To see how we build the example below, feel free to download it and pick it apart. However, if you really want to learn how to build something like this, try to rebuild it based on the image alone. The videos above will definitely help.
Today I've been teaching DS23 a bit of PBI. We teach PBI as more of awareness than expertise. I need them to understand how it work in the event it comes up while on their placements.
After creating some charts with Superstore and showing them how easy it is to download data from the web, I gave them (and myself) the task of completing Workout Wednesday 2020 Week 53. We had established the basics of building the charts so it was pretty simple, notwithstanding the inevitable formatting time (this is a lot of work in Tableau too).
Overall, I found this particular WW pretty simple with PBI. Give it a shot!
Last week, I was teaching DS23 about mobile design. We reviewed the pros and cons, what to think about from a user and usability perspective, how to make the most important information easy to understand, etc.
We then picked an image of a mobile dashboard we found on the internet and worked together to rebuild it. We started by creating a default dashboard, then looking at what Tableau's Device Designer would do to it.
We then decided to create a mobile-only dashboard as our use case what executives on the go. This also gave us a great excuse to practice using containers.
Time really flew by on today's #WatchMeViz. Before I knew it, an hour had passed, I'd built lots of things, and I hadn't yet decided on my "final" visualization. So instead, I have three this week!
Watch the video here to learn how I built these charts.
Viz 1 - Year over Year Change in Consumption of Food and Beverages in America
Viz 2 - Parallel Coordinates - How much do Americans spend on cereals relative to other products?
Viz 3 - Bump Chart - #MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 12 - How Does Cereal Rank in American Food Spending?
Containers...you either love them or hate them. And I want you to learn to love them.
In part one of this series, I showed you how to build a simple KPI dashboard with three cards. In the video below, I show you how to build a more complex dashboard that requires 7 containers:
Click for the interactive version
This video shows you how to organize the containers, how to use padding, and how to build an engaging dashboard for your stakeholders. Enjoy the video!
Data HAS to be consumed quickly to be understood and to make quick decisions. A "typical" profit and loss statement is on a spreadsheet. However, spreadsheets are notorious for (1) errors and (2) being very difficult to spot areas of concern.
That's where dashboards come into play. Back in July 2017 I proposed a new way to visualize a Profit & Loss Statement (P&L). The dashboard has been very well received and put into practice at many organizations. They've reported back to me how useful it has been.
But then I got thinking about an even easier way to visualize the data. I felt like the previous version was a bit chart heavy. So, while I've been creating templates for other areas of a business (HR, Social Media, Customer Service), I decided to also focus on a new version of a P&L statement with KPIs. This dashboard is based on a Finance Dashboard example from Excel Dashboard School.
You can download the data I used to build this template here. Click on the image below to interact with and download the workbook.
In this second live stream demonstration of how to effectively use layout containers, I got into an ever so slightly more complex use case, particularly with the header section and how to use shading and padding. Check out the first video and dashboard about social media KPIs here.
Layout containers are super useful, if you understand the concept for how to use them. In this livestream, I build a simple KPI dashboard of social media metrics.
I started by building a wireframe to show how I would use each container.
From there, I started constructing the dashboard. If you want to follow along, you can download the data here.
The link to the video below by Curtis Harris was a game changer for me as to how I understood Tiled vs. Floating. I can't recommend it enough. It's a big influence on every dashboard I create.
As part of the training at The Data School, we're often tasked by clients to build industry specific dashboards and/or dashboards that can be used as templates for their organization. Of course what the client can ask for is often much more broad. From a dashboarding perspective, we tend to have the freedom to create what we think works best for their data. This them, in turn, helps create a sort of "brand" for their dashboards internally.
That got me thinking about common use cases for dashboards, dashboards that would likely span industries and companies and could serve as templates for others. In this series, I'll be posting templates that I have been building based on the data and sample dashboards from Excel Dashboard School.
Let me make it clear that I am in no way criticizing the work they have created. My intent is to build an alternative method for displaying the data as a template in Tableau. The data and templates they have provided are the starting point for my work. I want to thank them for being so kind and sharing their work.
In this week's tip, I show you how to create a daily KPI view that counts the number of profitable days per month. This is a video that demonstrates my take on example 3 from the Top 15 LOD Expressions blog post on Tableau's website.
Typically I see people creating one sheet for their KPIs and another for a sparkline. In this tip, I show you how to combine them into a single worksheet. Less worksheets equals less maintenance!
And here we are, four years after starting Makeover Monday as a community project, it's my last week being involved. It's been a fantastic growth and learning opportunity. Thank you!
For the last week of 2019, I thought it would be fun to look back at the download stats for Makeover Monday on data.world. They've been hosting the data for us on their platform for over two years now.
I created the original viz using Google Data Studio.
What works well?
A clear, simple title
Using a filter for drilling down for a specific year
Labels on the inside end of the bars
Tooltips are very responsive
What could be improved?
Remove the x-axis
Make the font bigger for the subjects
Make it clear that this is only showing the top 10
Include an option to increase the number of bars shown
What I did
My primary goal was to poke fun at Eva. So I looked at who was more popular, she or I? I create BANs for some simple metrics and a couple simple line charts by week.
I chose to only use data from 2019 since it looked way too low for 2018. Perhaps the tracking only started at a certain point; I wasn't sure, so I decided to exclude 2018.
And that's it! I'm done! Keep participating; I guarantee you'll improve every week.
Four weeks to go with Makeover Monday 2019. We've had lots of interesting vizzes to makeover and lots of interesting data. This week, I wanted to pick a simple visualization and simple data.
What works well?
I like the handwriting font. It makes the viz look fun.
The colors are distinct enough.
Using shading on the title as a legend
What could be improved?
Some hands are holding another, some are not. What does that mean? Does two hands mean union? If so, I don't understand why they join where they do.
Using weekly wages is a tough concept to grasp. Why not convert it to annual wages?
The viz is clearly not designed for any sort of precision or comparison.
What I did
I really liked this Viz of the Day recently by Spencer Bauke and thought this was a good data set to try to emulate his work.
I wanted to use parameter actions to allow the user to change the comparison year.
I also wanted to use set actions like Spencer did, but this data wasn't structured in a way that made sense to try to do that.
This turned out to be very good practice for LOD expressions.
I loved using containers to lay all of this out!! It's a lot of work, but much easier to get everything to line up and all be the same size.
Here's my Makeover Monday week 49. Click on the image for the interactive version.
I ran across this post I wrote on another blog where I used to write about project management. The original post is from February 2007, two months before I first downloaded Tableau.
Reading it again, the message about effective metrics still holds true today. I've edited the post a bit to reflect data analysis projects rather than project management. At the time, I ran across a white paper that summarized the things we need to keep in mind for a metrics program. The paper didn't specify the metrics to collect, just the properties they should all have.
From my perspective, for any metric to be useful, it needs to help the stakeholder make decisions. All metrics should be actionable. If it's not actionable, then it's not useful.
Introduction
Information should be made available to all stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of a product. To be effective, metrics must be properly planned, managed and acted upon. What is measured, how it’s collected and how it’s interpreted are the difference between brilliant insights and blind alleys on the path to metrics-driven decision making.
The key is to ensure metrics are meaningful, up-to-date, unobtrusive, empirical and actionable.
#1 - MEANINGFUL
Metrics should focus on simple and fundamental units of measure for the given project. Understanding the key metrics across a portfolio of products can provide an important level of insight that enables organizations to understand opportunities and risks. It also provides a uniform basis for comparison across products, time, etc. Select metrics that will enable you to steer your company in a meaningful way.
#2 - UP-TO-DATE
It is important to look for metrics that can be captured automatically. Ensure that the metric is consistently based on up-to-date data.
#3 - UNOBTRUSIVE
The process of collecting data for your metrics program should be seamless and unobtrusive, not imposing new processes or asking stakeholders to spend time collecting or reporting on other data to get the answers to their questions.
#4 - EMPIRICAL
Metrics solutions should capture updated data as soon as reasonably possible, eliminating all of the issues that compromise the integrity and accuracy of data. Additionally, the use metrics that ensures data consistency; e.g., an working hour should be normalized to be the same in Boston, Bangalore, Mumbai and Beijing.
#5 - ACTIONABLE
It is critical that the metrics you gather inform specific decisions. Avoid information that is nice to know, but doesn’t help you make decisions or solve problems.
The litmus test for any metric is asking the question, “What decision or decisions does this metric inform?” Be sure you select your metrics based on a clear understanding of how actionable they are and be sure they are tied to a question you feel strongly you need to answer to effect the outcome.
It is also critically important to ensure that you are able to act on and react to metrics in a clear and meaningful way.
Finally, be sure that metrics are inclusive and that data is available to all stakeholders. Data that is widely available is empowering.
