Innovative Tableau

Chapter 73. How to Make an Alert-Style Splash Page with Cross-Dashboard Filters

In Chapter 49 from Practical Tableau (O’Reilly, 2018), I show how to create a heat map dashboard meant to highlight data points of interest to the viewer. An alert-style dashboard like this provides the benefit of not making your end users work too hard before deciding whether they should dig deeper. If using Tableau Server or Tableau Online to subscribe to the view, they might decide that nothing needs further investigation and not interact with the dashboard at all.

Of course, if you went through the trouble of making a dashboard to monitor the performance of a particular business objective, insights are likely to emerge fairly regularly. At that point, you have a lot of control in designing the dashboard user interface in a way that helps the end user take the next step as efficiently as possible. This chapter shows you how to make an alert-style splash page, or dashboard introduction, and two ways to link into deeper analyses.

To help illustrate the following approach, you’ll be using this variation of the Super Sample Superstore dashboard.

In this version, the end user lands on a splash page that shows the performance by region and trend for each of our three KPIs: Sales, Profit Ratio, and Days to Ship (and On Time Rate). This is a very high-level explanatory view meant primarily to alert the end user when something deserves further investigation. Note that I carried over a similar menu at ...