Tableau Your Data!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10 Conveying Your Findings with Stories

When Tableau first introduced Stories, I didn’t fully appreciate their value. A few weeks later, I was asked to judge a data visualization contest at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park. The contestants were provided multiple datasets and were given 60 minutes to analyze one of them. Each team had 60 seconds to present their findings to the judges.

The winning team presented a cogent set of findings with a compelling storyline. Even more impressive—each person on the winning team contributed 20 seconds of verbal narrative supported by Tableau Story Point visuals simply by clicking through descriptive captions. That’s when the real value of Stories became apparent to me.

Perhaps the story could have been told with a series of visualizations and dashboards, but each individual Story Point made it easier for the team to communicate quickl0,y and clearly annotating each Story Point highlighted important facts without the need for verbalizing the finding. It was an impressive presentation that didn’t feel cramped by the 1-minute time limit.

Turning Analysis into Insight

Stories are a type of sheet made up of dashboard or worksheet views that have been sequenced to support a guided analytic tour of your subject. These views are expressed as Story Points and introduced through navigation captions that include descriptive text provided by the author.

Creating a story is similar to building a dashboard. You drag the desired source material ...