Innovative Tableau

Chapter 62. How to Make a Signature Line with Data Status Alert

The practice of data visualization is very much a psychological exercise. If you can get in the head of your audience and understand their needs and what will resonate with them, you will maximize the chance of your visualization causing action. Some audiences rely on establishing trust with the data and/or the analyst themselves before taking action.

For this reason, I often like to close my dashboards with a signature line that usually includes:

• The name of the author and how to contact them
• A list of data sources the dashboard is created with
• A notification that informs the user whether the data is up-to-date

This chapter shares an example of a signature line on a Tableau dashboard and shows you how to create a data status alert so that your stakeholders will always know whether the data source is current.

How to Automatically Detect Whether Data Is Up-to-Date

To introduce the concept of a signature line on a dashboard, take a look at the bottom of the following Super Sample Superstore dashboard. Only the Explanatory dashboard is pictured, but you can find a similar signature line at the bottom of all three dashboards in the workbook:

Note I’ve included the name of the author and the data source with which the dashboard was built. This is a nice touch for amiable and analytical audiences who will want to build ...