How to Tableau: Summary Tiles for Dashboards - For Intermediate Tableau Users

hey everybody how's it going this is eric parker with one number and in today's tableau tutorial what i want to walk through is how i build summary tiles to place at the top of tableau dashboards there's a couple of different methods that i'll go through for creating this depends on the situation so we'll just take a little bit of time to talk about each of those today so as you can see like i have on the screen here this is a situation where this is based on an insurance company i was working with and i've actually created each of these five summary tiles at the top as individual worksheets just worked out better for what i was trying to do in that circumstance all right but i have other scenarios where i've created summary tiles as a single worksheet like in this restaurant example so this is actually one worksheet that's all tied together into three different summary tiles all right so summary tiles the reason i like to use them so much is they're just a helpful way to give bite-sized information to somebody who's going to look at your dashboard briefly but may not spend a ton of time there i also find them helpful occasionally as navigation tools so like in that restaurant dashboard you can click on the food icon and it will actually filter the entire dashboard down to just food related items okay so let me go ahead and flip over to a blank tableau workbook and we'll go ahead and get started building some of this kind of content ourselves i'm going to use the orders table from the sample superstore data set if you would like to follow along with something similar i've just put on my notepad here where you can find a similar kind of file on your computer so let's start with the circumstance where you have a single measure that you want to turn to summary tiles that's going to end up being multiple tiles at the top of your dashboard okay so i'll just go ahead and call this regional profit summary all right so what i'm going to do for this is i'm going to start by grabbing my region field okay from my data pane and i'm going to drag and drop this field onto the columns shelf okay so what that's going to do is just going to give me four columns or four slices and then we're talking about regional profits so then i'm just going to grab my profit field and i'm going to drag and drop that onto text in the marks card now technically you could say these are summary tiles you can put this at the top of the dashboard and you're done but let me show you a few tricks that i like to utilize to really get these to look nice and pop out for your end user okay so first of all probably want the text to be a little bit bigger we probably want it to fill in a little bit more space so i'm going to select the fit selector on my toolbar and change it from standard to entire view okay and then i'm going to select text in the marks card and i'll go ahead and hit the little bullets here to be able to edit and i'm going to change summer profit to be much larger let's say let's try 20 in bold okay so that's looking quite a bit better and i'm going to get that text to center align all right so this is coming along here's a couple other tricks that i like to use i might want to add some borders in between those squares just to break them up a bit so that can actually be done through the color tab and the marks card actually we'll need to add a color to be able to do that first so let me show you where we will add borders uh through formatting rather instead so i'm going to right click in the background of this worksheet and select format okay and then you can see there are some tabs here at the top uh the formatting window so you can see that one that i had highlighted when i just grabbed the screen here called borders that's where we're going to want to start with this okay and let's try and add some column dividers here so i'm going to add a line for my column divider i'm going to choose let's say medium thickness and the third gray from the top left corner okay so notice as of right now that column divider is only showing up on the very edge of my worksheet so the last trick that we want to utilize here is to move this level slider from the left to the right so now it's going to drop that level the column divider into the level where it's going between each of my squares now to go ahead and kind of complete the look here i probably just want to match my row dividers to my column dividers so i'm going to make sure those are a little thicker and darker as well okay now a couple more things i like to do here just to get these to pop out this is just my own personal preference but i really like to have the label like the region label in the square with the number so there's not this sort of gap and potential dissociation between the uh label and the number and of course that's exaggerated right now because this is going to be a lot more consolidated on the dashboard but still that's just my own personal preference so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get a copy of my region field from the data pane and i'm going to drop that on text in the marks card and i want to move that region label to the top and i want to make it a little bit smaller so i'll go back into text select the bullets again to edit okay bring region to the top also want this centered maybe not bold maybe size 12. and then something just to be careful of here if you do something like this try not to leave this trailing blank because that's actually going to make it so that your text is no longer vertically aligned it's actually going to be shoved to the top a little bit i'm just going to make sure i clear that okay if i want to format profit so it's dollars you know so it looks a little better could do something like that okay so now since i have the regional labels here like where it says central it's not there i can actually hide the region labels so i can right click on the region pill in my column shelf and deselect show header i probably don't need the tool tip unless i'm packing some additional information in there that's not visible already so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select the tool tip tab in my marks card and deselect this button show tooltips okay and then finally this is a lot of these things are optional this is also optional i like to make the summary tile backgrounds just a slight off color so that they stand out a little bit so if i want to make it like a light gray background instead of pure white i'm going to right click in the background of my summary tile select format and then in the shading tab of the formatting window okay so that's this little paint bucket icon here i'm going to select that and my worksheet background will be just a slight off-white okay so now what i'm going to do i've got an example dashboard pulled up there's basically nothing in it at this point it's largely just to show you how this would fit in and i'm going to take my regional profit summary worksheet drag this to the top of the dashboard right click and hide the title unless that was helpful i mean actually that might be helpful here because i haven't had i haven't said profit anywhere else unless i put profit uh in the summary tile probably a good idea to keep this title in retrospect so um i'll upset it the title is to make this text a little smaller i don't want it competing with uh the text in my summary tiles and i'll go ahead and scrunch these down okay so that's one way to create a summary tile and that's especially helpful if you are using the same metric sliced up by a dimension okay so now i want to walk through okay what if you have a situation where it actually makes more sense to have individual summary tiles and a good example of that was that kiva loans dashboard that i flashed earlier something that i was trying to do was to match the border of each summary tile to the color of that measure in the bar chart down below and i was just trying to do that for some sort of long-term or short-term uh color and memory association just to make it easier to track with the dashboard like oh i know green means repayment percentage so if you have a situation like that i'm going to show you maybe what's the easiest way to create summary tiles so i'll do a new worksheet and let's say that i want to do a tile for sales a tile for profit and a tile for discount percentage okay so i'm going to call this my profit tile it's actually going to start pretty similar to what we just did in that last worksheet i'll do it a little faster this time since you've seen this once before i'm going to grab profit from my data pane drag and drop that on text in the marks card okay i'm gonna set my worksheet uh fit to switch from standard to entire view i'm gonna select text in the marks card change my alignment to centered okay and then i'm going to go in use the bullets here to do some editing and i'll just call this profit make this a little bit larger i think it was 12 in that last dashboard and i'll make the uh the measure size 20 in bold okay so similar things i want to do here and go ahead once again and turn the tool tip off okay and actually here's one really nice thing that if you already have a style that you like in one worksheet you can actually just copy that formatting and paste it into another worksheet so if i go back to regional profit summary i can right click on the worksheet title and say copy formatting and so but you can see that down here right click copy formatting go to my other worksheet right click and paste formatting okay you can see that the uh the row dividers didn't come in perfect but it dropped in that background shading which is kind of nice and let's say we're going to try and do this similar to that keva loans example so i want unique border colors for each of my worksheets i'm actually going to handle that in the dashboard this time around so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into format i'm actually just going to turn column dividers off for now and same thing with row dividers okay so i have my profit tile now i want to create my tiles for sales and discount percentage so what i like to do is get one tile exactly where i want it and then i'll right click on that tile and duplicate okay so now i've got my sales tile and there's a lot less work that i have to do all i've got to do is get my sales field and drag and drop it directly over my profit field okay go into text in the markz card hit the buttons to edit and just change the label here to sales okay probably do a little number formatting there to make it look like a dollar field okay and now one more time for discount percentage so duplicate this one more time drake discount on top of sales looks weird it's because uh there's a couple things i need to do to discount here it should be a percentage actually so let me change the number format to percentage okay and i think what's going to be more practical than adding all of our discount percentages together would be utilizing an average so once again i'll change the title here i'll call this average discount percent okay and now we have our three tiles so when i bring these together i'll go ahead and go to example dashboard two and i'll show you how i like to bring them into the dashboard so click on this tab and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna click on the horizontal container in objects okay this is a layout container oh i did not mean to slash it i'm so sorry horizontal layout container meant to put a border around it alright so horizontal layout container one of the things that it helps you do is to lay out objects in an orderly manner and one of my favorite aspects is that allow you to distribute objects evenly so instead of me sitting there and trying to get the pixels just right so that the worksheets are all the same width the horizontal layout container can help me do that so i'll drag horizontal layout container to the top of the screen and let's go ahead and start grabbing our tiles so i'll start with sales drag and drop this in here note the blue border okay that's really important the blue border is my indicator oops not like this okay so this blue border is my indicator that a worksheet is getting dropped into a layout container not just kind of out into dashboarding space so sales tile is going in there i want to follow that up with the profit tile so notice that blue border i'm trying to get it to go to the right of my sales tile and then same thing with the discount percentage tile okay looks like they already distributed evenly that's really nice that's one of the things the layout container will help you do automatically in case you're not sure you can click on the background of one of these worksheets and that little handle at the top with the lines that you usually use to grab a worksheet and move it around on your dashboard if you double click on that it will actually grab the layout container that object is inside of if it is in fact inside a layout container so i'm going to hit the drop down for more options and just in case they're not even or if yours aren't even for some reason you can say distribute contents evenly they should all be the same width okay i'm just going to fire through quickly and hide the titles for each of these and then again to match kiva loans if i want different colored borders what i would do is i'm going to go to the the uh the worksheet i'm interested in like in this case sales okay then i'm going to go to the layout section or the layout menu in my dashboard i'm going to start adding some borders so let's say that the sales border should be blue i'm just going to kind of make things up here so let's say it's a medium blue let's say profit is more of a medium green and discount percentage is more of a medium orange okay so now you know if those color codings meant something throughout the dashboard and they could be associated i've got those colors right off the bat it's almost like a color legend for my end user tied into my summary tiles so those are the two different types of methods that i use to create summary tiles there may be some other tricks out there if you have some ideas feel free to share those in the comments or if you've got any questions feel free to drop those in there as well so thank you for following along for this tutorial i hope it's been helpful and i look forward to catching you in another one soon

Channel: OneNumber LLC

Views: 2,749

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Id: wFww9VMIxEw

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021