Innovative Tableau

Chapter 85. How to Make Automated Insights in Tableau

In Chapter 84, we examine how to add custom integrated insights to a Tableau dashboard; a feature that does not come out-of-the-box in the software. This is an important prescriptive tactic that helps explain your insights and actionable recommendations. But what if you could automate those insights? Well, you can compute just about any calculation in Tableau. The results of these calculations can then be combined with text to provide automatic insights to you and your audience.

In this chapter, we reverse engineer a Tableau Public visualization to show how automatic insights are created, I demonstrate how to concatenate text and computed string results to automatically spell out full sentences in Tableau, and we use LOD expressions to create an automatic insight that compares the performance of a specific dimension member to a benchmark.

An Example of Automatic Insights in Tableau

I haven’t shared this before, but my favorite visualization I’ve ever personally created is Your Salary vs. a MLB Player’s Salary—and it even has donut charts on it!

Questionable practices aside, there are several elements I like about this one:

• The user becomes part of the story by inputting their own salary.

• The bars appear to animate (an illusion created by ordering the bars so that they would render sequentially).

• Simple design.

• Cross-branding and linking.

There’s even an Easter egg if you type in a salary greater than a million dollars! ...