Innovative Tableau

Chapter 74. How to Make an Intro-Style Dashboard with Cross-Dashboard Navigation

I have to admit that I have yet to use Tableau’s story points feature in any of my consulting engagements. The spirit of the feature is great, and when it was released, I was excited by the prospect of replacing PowerPoint to share my data stories. But the reason I don’t personally use story points stems from my point of view that getting the point across in the first screen is your best chance at causing an impact. I believe that most users simply will not click through multiple pages to figure out what you’re trying to tell them.

That being said, I also believe in providing context/setup for dashboards and—as you’ve seen so far in Part IV—strategically breaking up views into their own dashboards and/or workbooks. This chapter shows you how to make a variety of story points to introduce a dashboard and improve the chances of your end user flipping through interior workbook pages.

Don’t Bury the Workbook Lead

For one example of an intro-style dashboard, take a look at the winning entry in the 2016 War of TUGs data visualization competition, the Kansas City Tableau User Group’s Does Education Really Matter? This workbook was meant to reaffirm that the My Brother’s Keeper program is an important program to keep intact. One of several aspects I like about this entry in the contest is that although the workbook contains several pages, they didn’t “bury the lead”:

The first dashboard ...