Tableau Desktop Cookbook

Chapter 7. Basic Dashboards

Dashboards are used to bring together the sheets you have created, allowing comparisons between the data simultaneously. Dashboards allow you to add more interactivity among the other sheets you have created. When sharing your work with colleagues, the individual sheets you have created may work well for an analyst, but dashboards really need to help everyone see and understand all aspects of the data in one or several views.

7.1 Build a Basic Dashboard

Problem

You have several sheets that you want to combine to show the overall picture of the data.

Solution

This recipe uses solutions from previous recipes (3.1, 5.2, and 6.2).

1. 

   Create a New Dashboard. The left pane shows all your sheets in the workbook.

2. Drag the “Map for Dashboard” (Recipe 6.2) onto the dashboard:

   

   Your view should look like this:

   

3. Add “Sales over Time” to the dashboard (5.2). This time, we are going to drag it under the map, so it shows the gray shaded area:

   

   Note

   By default, Tableau creates a tiled layout. For more information, see “Using Horizontal and Vertical Containers” ...