Use Tableau Desktop to Build Trust in Your Data

Contributed by: Carl Allchin

Difficulty level: Beginner

Whenever I show a chart or dashboard to someone who hasn’t worked with modern business intelligence software before, I get a look of skepticism if my findings contradict their experience. That isn’t a bad thing, but this Tableau Shortcut will show you how to build trust in your output.

The figure below shows a view of the “Top 10 Customers by Sales” over the last four years (data taken from Tableau’s Superstore dataset). Our top selling customer is Raymond Buch. If the sales manager looked at this report, they might be surprised that there was such an escalation in sales between 2021 and 2022, given that the salesperson said Raymond was a more promising customer earlier in 2021. Given that, they’d expect these sales numbers to be much higher.

Note: in this figure I’ve set the color of the bars to black because I’ve learned to only apply color when we need to add emphasis or a theme to the chart.

Figure 1. Top 10 Customers by Sales in the last 4 years

As the salesperson, to build trust with the sales manager, you can easily show them what sales were made in 2021. When you use your mouse to click the bar indicating Raymond’s 2021 sales, you’ll see a tooltip appear with some useful icons at the top of it as shown in the figure below. Click on the dashed line icon in the top ...