Creating a dashboard

- [Instructor] When you manage all or part of an organization, it is absolutely vital that you have the information you need at your fingertips. In Tableau, you can bring that information into a single place by creating a dashboard. In this movie, I will demonstrate how to create a dashboard. My sample file is the CreateDashboard workbook, and you can find it in the Chapter13 folder of your Exercise Files collection. This workbook contains three sheets. I have BaseData which is a text table showing Product Category expenses for two years, 2015 and 2016.

Then I have ExpenseCategory which breaks out by category but not by year. And then ExpenseTrend which shows line graphs with the trend of expenses for each of the categories from 2015 and 2016. If I want to create a dashboard I can go down to the Task Bar at the bottom of the program window and click the middle of the three Create buttons here and I have New Dashboard, and I'll click that, and Tableau creates a new dashboard.

There are a number of ways that I can work with this dashboard. The first is to change its size. Currently, if I click the Size controls down arrow I see that it's 1000 pixels by 800. I can also click the down arrow for the list box above it and from there I can find a number of different resolutions. An embedded blog, Small Blog Embedded, Column, or I could go down to Custom and click that. For this demonstration I'll stay with the default.

Now to add a sheet to my dashboard I just drag it from the sheets area of the Dashboard tab and onto the dashboard sheet. So I'll drag BaseData on and you see that it takes up the entire width of the dashboard. I can make it smaller by going over to the down arrow here at the top right, clicking it and then about three quarters of the way down click Floating. And that makes this particular control much smaller.

It's basically just wide enough with a little extra room to show its contents. I can resize by dragging the edges or the corner and I can also move it by putting the mouse pointer over the center of the Title bar. When the pointer changes to a four-way arrow, I can drag the control anywhere I want it to go. I'll move it down just a little bit, give it a little white space off the top. Now I can do the same with ExpenseCategory so I'll drag that on, go to the top right, click Floating, and I also see that I have a title, or rather a legend, that shows the range of values based on the color gradient.

I don't want to work with that, or I don't want to keep it so I'll click it, click the down arrow, and click Remove from Dashboard and then I'll click ExpenseCategory and then drag it over to the side. And then finally I can add ExpenseTrend, so I'll drag that on. There is my visualization, click the down arrow, click Floating, and drag it down. And I also see at the top that I have Product Category so I'll click that and then at the top right, click the down arrow, and click Remove from Dashboard.

So I no longer have my legend but if I want to I can always add that data in a text box. So there we go. I have my basic data, a representation of the expenses based on total share over the two years, and also a trend on how those expenses have moved up and down over the years 2015 and 2016.