When I first started out with Tableau, I just dragged things onto the dashboard because it’s the most intuitive thing to do or perhaps it’s a result of having worked for years in a Microsoft environment. You expect a Tableau dashboard to work like a PowerPoint. The thing is, it doesn’t. The rules of dashboarding are different in the Tableau universe.
Here are a few things I learned the hard way about setting up a dashboard in Tableau:
Know your design before you Tableau
When I used to draw things with a pencil on paper as a child, my artist father always told me this – visualise your art in your head first. You won’t go building a house with bricks and mortar before you know the layout of all the rooms, would you? Same principle follows here. Know what your design is before you start building your dashboard.
I think it requires quite a bit of skill to know what you are trying to draw and is a great exercise in mind-body connection. For some people, it can even be a meditative process.
You won’t go building a house with bricks and mortar before you know the layout of all the rooms, would you?
Anyway, the same principle applies to a Tableau dashboard. Know what you want your dashboard to look like and then start your work. I found creating a sketch with pen and paper super helpful. While pen and paper is the easiest option, another handy tool is excalidraw. Its a nice intuitive way to quickly sketch something on a screen.
Note that you don’t have to know the EXACT layout, to the pixel. Be open to change. But know for certain, change in which part of the design is negotiable and which isn’t.
Hierarchies in a Tableau dashboard
I never really cared much about hierarchies in the dashboard section when I started out but realized much later that that’s perhaps the most useful section. I think how elegant your tableau dashboard design is, is judged by the neatness and cleanliness of your hierarchy.
So once you are done designing your dashboard, have a look at your object hierarchy. If it looks well organized, your dashboard should work fine.
How elegant your tableau dashboard design is, is judged by the neatness and cleanliness of your hierarchy
Designing with Containers
When you look at a nicely done dashboard, all you see is the final product. But to a trained eye, there are layers upon layers of containers nested in neat hierarchies in there that make up a good dashboard.
I think the biggest hurdle I have faced in understanding Tableau dashboards is their containers. If you are used to working with Microsoft PowerPoint or some other software such as Canva, working on formatting the layout of the visualization is more intuitive than it is in Tableau. So if you are learning to create dashboards in Tableau I would suggest spending maximum time understanding how to use containers and how to lay them out before you advance any further.
So once you have created a rough pen-and-paper draft of your vizz, try to figure out what sort of containers you will need to make that visualization.
As a rookie to Tableau, this has helped me a great deal and saved a lot of time too.
Tiled vs Floating
Secondly, there are two ways to put objects onto your dashboard. You can just drag them and use floating objects, which is the more intuitive way to do it, or you can use the tiled option, which a priori sounds like a more rigid way to do things. One may think that dragging and dropping floating objects gives one more flexibility in design, whereas a tiled option makes you work with the limitations of the tiles. But actually, the tiled option works better. Keeping your objects Floating has the potential to mess everything up especially if your dashboard is being viewed in a different screen size.
Using Blank Objects to your advantage
It’s very confusing to “see” what kind of container you have created. So putting two blank objects in the container at the outset helps. How? Because the way the blank objects place themselves in the container helps to know what sort of container it is – whether it’s a horizontal or vertical container. Well, you can always know what kind of container it is by clicking on the container and checking the Item Hierarchy to see what has been highlighted. But having the Blank objects helps visualise things better. Use borders on blank objects to form the grid (and later remove the borders). It helps in laying out the different elements. And when you are done, you can just remove the blanks!
And when you place sheets in a dashboard, don’t simply place the sheet in the main container. Within that main container, add more containers (either vertical or horizontal) and then add the sheets to those. This helps to individually control each sheet. It’s quite helpful to use separate containers for the titles of the sheets too. So basically every object you would like to play around with, if it’s placed in its own container, it helps. This is how you can work within the rigid system of the tiled layout and use it to your advantage.
