Database Reference
In-Depth Information
▪ The timeline has been moved to the top of the Dashboard. It's a message about the surge,
not a geography lession, so the timeline is more important than the map and deserves a
more prominent seat at the table.
▪ New annotations appear that are color-coded (blue for the United States and red for Ch-
ina).
Again, everything else has been stripped away or made to fade into the background so that
nothing gets in the way of the main message, which is that China has vaulted to the top. Per-
haps a similar Dashboard will be created in a couple years' time showing how India did the
same.
There are probably dozens more explanatory dashboards that could be created with this data
set. I wouldn't have found these insights unless I had created the exploratory dashboard in
the first place. In that sense, Tableau is not only a great data presentation tool, it's also a great
data discovery tool. You have to find the story before you can tell it, and I just can't imagine
finding many stories with a spreadsheet.
Summary
We've seen in this chapter how to combine multiple Sheets onto Dashboards in Tableau, and
how to configure them to create a richly interactive experience for our audience. We've used
functions like Dashboard Actions (filters and highlights) and we've seen how to annotate and
format to create the kind of experience that we want to create. We've seen how to do this for
both exploratory dashboards as well as explanatory dashboards.
In the next chapter, we'll consider some more advanced use cases in Dashboard building,
like adding web pages and embedding video, among others. Returning to this chapter's ana-
logy, if a Dashboard is a building, then these features are the high-tech appliances we install
into them once they've been built.
