June 2014
Beginner to intermediate
334 pages
7h 35m
English
Content preview from Communicating Data with TableauBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 12. The Joy of Dashboards
“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces—just good food from fresh ingredients.”
—
If we compare communicating data with cooking, then what we’ve covered so far in this book amounts to a course on individual ingredients. Just as a master chef knows how to combine ingredients to serve up a meal, so an expert communicator of data can mix different charts, graphs, and tables to deliver a multifaceted message.
The analogy to a meal in this context is known as a dashboard. In this chapter, we’ll consider different types and styles of dashboards, and we’ll outline key factors to consider before creating them for consumption.
But first, it’s important that we distinguish between two different, but related meanings of the word:
- A data dashboard
A single display that combines multiple data visualizations, tables, text, and figures to give a multifaceted view of a subject.
- Dashboards in Tableau
One of two tab types (the other type is a Sheet) that allows users to combine one or more Sheets with other objects—such as text, images, and web pages—into a single display.
The first definition is a general term describing how data is shared, and the second relates specifically to Tableau. The main difference between the two is that a data dashboard always involves multiple views in the same display, while a Dashboard in Tableau doesn’t necessarily include multiple views (though it often does).
In other words, it’s possible to create a Tableau Dashboard ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.