Innovative Tableau

Chapter 100. 3 Innovative Ways to Integrate Other Products: Tip 3

How to Make a Commenting System with Google Forms Integration

Chapter 84 shows you how to add custom integrated insights to a Tableau dashboard. This tactic allows you to communicate insights and recommendations directly on dashboards. There are two drawbacks to this approach:

• You must direct the user to a different view to enter their commentary
• The text is static until the comments are updated manually

This chapter shares a new approach to adding custom comments directly to a Tableau dashboard by integrating Google Forms and using layout containers to create a seamless commenting system. On top of that, you can filter comments by date and user!

To illustrate how to create comment cards in Tableau, Let’s re-create the right side of this variation to the Super Sample Superstore dashboard:

First, set up a Google Form, a free tool that comes with Gmail accounts. To find or add to your Google Forms, in the upper-right corner of your Gmail account, click the Google apps menu next to your avatar and then click the More button:

You can add questions to a Google Form by clicking the plus sign in the upper-right corner of the form. I recommend adding at least one Short Answer question and one Multiple Choice question. ...