Building Interactive Tableau Dashboards

Tableau is a rapid-fire business intelligence software that allows you to make decisions at a very fast pace. Tableau is also a leading new generation Business Intelligence (BI) application which is also dubbed as “self-service” data discovery tool as it can be achieved with almost no support from IT staff.

This product shines as a graphical tool or a visualization tool, where you would have relied on various other tools and takes longer durations to represent the bar charts or the pie charts. Tableau is built to perform and it provides very quick visual analytics.

Tableau is best suited for creating quick view dashboards to check on details that are most needed and based on the requirement, the data can be drilled down to further levels.

Tableau Dashboards with an example:

Let us take a sample data sheet that is available from the Tableau Public site’s download section named 'Sample - Superstore Sales (Excel).xls'. We will try to load data available in this data sheet and then try to see how we can dashboards out of it.

Once you have the data that should be loaded on to Tableau Desktop and then the Tableau Desktop available for usage, simply load the data file through the selection box and the datasheet gets loaded on to the Tableau Desktop software without any issues.

Let’s take a look at how this is done and how does it look just after loading the datasheet into the Tableau Desktop software. Once the data-sheet is loaded as per the screenshot earlier, the data-sheet is shown as a Connection on Tableau Desktop (marked in Red, on the left most of the screenshot).

The data available in the datasheet had 3 tables worth data and once of the data is dragged and dropped into the console, we can see that the data of that table is being displayed for us to refer. The other two boxes highlighted in Red are the data sheet’s data that is made available for us to use and the data within it. Now this data, we can create a new dashboard of it.

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To create a new dashboard, as all we need to do is to go to the Worksheet, as shown in the screenshot below (shown as a tooltip, at the bottom left of the screenshot). The moment, we click on the sheet by name Sheet1, it loads the sheet into Tableau Desktop software for us to create a lot of things that can be used within Tableau Desktop.

Once the sheet is loaded into Tableau software, this is how it looks like after adding a few Dimensions and Measures to create a nice view out of the data that has been created. The view below is created once the Sheet1 is clicked above and then the necessary Dimensions and Measures being pulled into the Columns / Rows of the datasheet.

 

Drag the Dimension OrderID into the Rows section as shown in the screenshot below and drag the Discount Measure into the Columns section to generate this beautiful view of the Order data that has been made available with us in the Datasheet that we have uploaded to Tableau Desktop software in the very first step.

 

 

To create a new dashboard out of the data that is available, click on the Dashboard menu and then click on New Dashboard. This will create a new dashboard with the name Dashboard1. After the dummy dashboard with the name that you specify is created, you will have to drag and drop the sheet that you have generated in the step earlier (in this case, it is going to be Sheet1). Take a look at the screenshot below to understand the various options available on the created Dashboard.

 

As per the screenshot made available above, you can see that we have dragged and dropped the sheet Sheet1 on the pane where the data is being displayed for us to view. The dashboard that has been created for us is being shown to us with the name mentioned,

here, in this case, it is Dashboard1. And coming to the larger box highlighted in red is the choice that you make to choose the kind of view that you want to see (basically on which device you want to see this dashboard), based on that the size in pixels will be changed and the view gets changed. We will leave this part for you to explore as there are quite a number of options available to be experimented with.

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Now with this data available, I can make changes in the view to see the data in a different manner and drill down based on the need be. A sample dashboard with a change in view is being presented for your ready reference, just so that the data be presented in a better manner.

Conclusion:

In this article, we have tried to give you a brief about what Tableau as software can provide you or your organization with. Alongside those details, we have provided necessary information on how to create new dashboards on Tableau and how to use the newly created dashboard for quicker access to details.

Hope this article is informative enough to provide all the necessary details at one place for your quicker references.

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