Tableau Dashboard Creation for Beginners

A dashboard is a collection of several views, letting you compare a variety of data simultaneously.

When you have a set of views, you can set up a dashboard to review them all together. In Tableau, you create worksheets, and these worksheets are set in a dashboard to view them all together. All the worksheets and dashboards are interlinked. If you make changes in the worksheet the data in the dashboard also changes.

When we have created one or more sheets and graphs, you can assemble them in Dashboard.

First of all, we start with connecting to the data source. When we launch Tableau public from the desktop, on the main screen, there are many options to connect to various data sources such as Microsoft Excel, Text File, Jason file, Microsoft Access, and Pdf File as shown in the below picture.

In our case, I will be using a Microsoft Excel file, Sample-Superstore. It has Orders, People, and returns three sheets. When we drag sheets to the right it establishes a connection between sheets.

1. Creating A Worksheet

A new worksheet can be opened by clicking the ‘+’ sign on the bottom bar.

-By Right Click on the worksheet and then clicking on ‘New Worksheet’.

- From the Toolbar on top, by clicking on New Worksheet.

We can rename the worksheet, by right-clicking on the worksheet and then clicking on Rename. Also, when we double-click on the worksheet name at the bottom, we can rename it.

Firstly, I have created a funnel chart for subcategory-wise Profit.

To Create a Funnel Chart, first of all, drag Profit to Rows. Now drag, Subcategory to color in the Marks section, Profit to size, and Profit to label. Then sort it to descending.

By Clicking on The Marks field, we can select chart types like bar, line, area, pie, and circle. Also, we can select colors for charts, labels, sizes, and details for the charts from the marks section. We can give Label from the ‘T’(Text) in the Marks section.

When You create charts, Legends appear on the right side of the chart. Legends are used to identify data in charts by color, size, and details.

For Creating this dashboard, I have created four worksheets a funnel chart,

A Bump Chart, A Pareto Chart, and a Word cloud.

2. Customize Worksheets

We can customize the worksheet and change the appearance of the visualization we create. We can change the background color of the worksheet, by right click on the worksheet and clicking on ‘format’. When we click on Format, the 'Format Font’ tab opens on the left side of the worksheet. When we select the ‘shading’ tab it gives the option to change color in the ‘Default settings. We can change the color from drop down from Worksheet.

From the ‘Format Font’ field, we can change the color of labels in the worksheet from the pane, color, and font of the header, legends, and Title of the Worksheet.

3. Open a dashboard

A new dashboard can be opened from the ‘Dashboard’ icon from the menu bar on top and also from the ‘New Dashboard’ button on the bottom bar as shown below.

When we click a New Dashboard button, it opens a blank dashboard page. There are two tabs on the left side of the dashboard, a Dashboard and a layout pane. A Dashboard pane is the default view. It has four sections, Device preview, Size, sheets, and Objects.

The size of this Dashboard can be adjusted from the size option on the dashboard pane. When we click on the drop-down on size, we can change the height and width of the dashboard.

4. Adding Sheets

When we click on the worksheet names displayed on the dashboard pane, we can add sheets to the dashboard.

Also, we can drag the worksheets to the dashboard.

5. Adding Objects

The Objects are the items that we can add to the dashboard. It helps to customize the visualization of dashboards. We can add objects to the dashboard, by dragging objects to the dashboard or double-clicking on it.

Objects have the following sections like

· Horizontal and Vertical container. These objects help in the horizontal and vertical layout of the containers which helps in the formatting of the dashboard.

· Text allows entering text in the header and description section of the dashboard. We can format the text like font size, Font, bold, italics, and text alignment.

· Extension can be added to the dashboard that creates extra links to the information.

· Image helps to add images to the dashboard.

· Web page helps in adding a web page to the dashboard.

The object section has tiled and floating tabs. When sheets are arranged in a Tiled layout, they all can be arranged together.

The floating layout has sheets placed independently. They can be formatted more easily.

6. Layout Pane

From the layout pane on the left, we can change the layout of the dashboard, like giving borders to sheets on the dashboard, changing the background color and size of sheets and the dashboard.

We can increase or decrease the outer as well as inner padding for the borders of worksheets and dashboards.

7. Dashboard

The above image shows the final dashboard, this has different visualizations in a single dashboard, a funnel chart, a bump chart, a Pareto chart, and a word cloud. This type of visualization helps in different analyses in a single dashboard.

In this blog, I tried to explain how we can create a dashboard and customize it. Hope this helps in making a dashboard.