Building Interactive Dashboards with Tableau

Video description

As businesses collect increasing amounts of vital data, the need for effective, intuitive, and actionable interfaces increases every day. Tableau is part of a new class of business intelligence tools, which dramatically reduce the time and technical acumen required to derive insights from data and publish it in a consumable format.

We'll begin by laying the groundwork for a successful dashboard and then move on to constructing five different dashboards of increasing complexity.

Starting with the Strategic/Executive dashboard, we’ll design a few of the most common dashboard elements and assemble our first complete dashboard. Next, we’ll show you how to use Tactical dashboards for visualizations that can help depict progress and draw attention to important areas. We’ll then dive into increasing the dashboard interactivity by using Operational dashboards when focusing on granular detail. Using advanced techniques in Tableau, we’ll then show you how to use Analytical dashboards that can provide you with the tools to effectively extract knowledge from your data. We’ll also walk through how to quickly create a visualization using Ad-hoc dashboards that allow you to effectively keep an eye on a specific area of interest. Lastly, we’ll cover the styling settings and publication options and conclude with best practices.

This course guides you through the entire “how and why” of each task in the dashboard creation process, which will translate easily to your own dashboard projects.

This course uses Tableau Desktop/Public 8.1, while not the latest version available, it provides relevant and informative content for legacy users of Tableau.

What You Will Learn

  • Develop intuitive and informative executive-level dashboards with the appropriate depth of interactivity
  • Empower tactical teams to track progress and opportunities using charts and interactivity that quickly surfaces key insights
  • Create engaging Operational dashboards to monitor pipeline activities and drive team KPIs
  • Expose advanced analytical tools to analysts and others who need to dive in deep to explore the data
  • Produce customized visualizations of data to support the decision processes of your stakeholders
  • Deliver your finished dashboard with an informative user interface that guides, informs, and amazes your audience
  • Publish and distribute your work confidently using the best methods and options for your audience

Audience

This video course is for data analysts who want to build interactive and powerful dashboards using Tableau.

Table of contents

  1. Chapter 1 : Exploring Possibilities and Positioning for Success
    1. Beginning with the End in Mind
    2. Using "Show Me" and Chart Types
    3. Enabling User-facing Filtering
    4. Creating Parameters
    5. Calculating Your KPIs
  2. Chapter 2 : Strategic or Executive Dashboards
    1. Understanding the Strategic or Executive Dashboard Project
    2. Creating Text Elements
    3. Calculating Period-over-period Changes
    4. Visualizing Comparisons with Bullet Charts
    5. Arranging Elements on a Dashboard
  3. Chapter 3 : Tactical Dashboards
    1. Understanding the Tactical Dashboard Project
    2. Building Waterfall Charts
    3. Constructing Heat Map Charts
    4. Displaying Geographical Map Charts
    5. Linking Together Dashboard Objects
  4. Chpater 4 : Operational Dashboards
    1. Understanding the Operational Dashboard Project
    2. Building Combo Charts
    3. Constructing Positional Circle Charts
    4. Using URL Actions
    5. Linking Together Dashboards with Actions
  5. Chapter 5 : Analytical Dashboards
    1. Understanding the Analytical Dashboard Project
    2. Creating Robust Time-series Charts
    3. Using Parameters to Control Display and Slicing Dimensions
    4. Incorporating a Highlight Table
    5. Extracting Aggregated or Raw Data from the Viz
  6. Chapter 6 : Ad-hoc Dashboards
    1. Understanding the Ad-hoc Dashboard Project
    2. Working with Sets and Groups
    3. Creating Bins and Box and Whisker Charts
    4. Annotating Points, Marks, and Areas
    5. Generating Funnel Charts
  7. Chapter 7 : Customizing and Styling Your Dashboard
    1. Styling Concepts and Best Practices
    2. Formatting Axis Labels and Lines
    3. Creating Relevant Labels and Effective Number Formats
    4. Formulating Helpful and Informative Tooltips
    5. Formatting Parameters and Legends
  8. Chapter 8 : Dashboard Publication
    1. Preparing for Publication
    2. Publishing on Tableau Public
    3. Publishing on Tableau Server and Tableau Online
    4. Employing Tableau Reader
    5. Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

Product information

  • Title: Building Interactive Dashboards with Tableau
  • Author(s):
  • Release date: July 2014
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781782177302