Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13. Building Dashboards
“'Data! Data! Data!' he cried impatiently. 'I can't make bricks without clay.'”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”
In this chapter, let's return to the analogy we used in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1
and compare the act of communicating data with building a structure. As the famous fictional
detective Sherlock Holmes relates emphatically in this chapter's epigraph, the raw material
that we're using is data.
Now, neither we nor our audience have Holmes' superior powers of deduction, so we need to
take the raw material and build a suitable structure in order to facilitate discovery. And if the
data is the clay, then the bricks are the individual charts and graphs, and the overall structure
is the dashboard.
Building a dashboard that communicates data well doesn't happen all at once. It requires
some creative thought and diligent crafting. And like all creative processes, the process of
building a data dashboard is rarely linear. There is typically a great deal of reworking and
fine-tuning throughout.
That being said, it is useful to identify the different activities involved in creating dashboards
in Tableau, and the general order in which they occur:
Design
Make a few rough sketches of dashboard layouts that use your data to help you accom-
plish your overall goal, taking into consideration the medium and channel that you will
use to deliver the final version to your audience.
Sheets
Build each visualization as an individual Sheet and then add them to your dashboard, ar-
ranging them with their Quick Filters, Parameters, and Legends according to your chosen
layout and dashboard size.
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