How to use a Tableau dashboard: Tableau tutorial for beginners

hey it's tim here now for a long time i've always tried to make videos on this channel that really help everyone get to grips with tablet but a large part of my audience have actually been people who build dashboards and it dawned on me the other day is there a guide for people who don't build dashboards and so i went to google which is where i start all my research before i make a video and i simply type that question in and when you hit an answer i was really surprised to find that there's not one resource on the home page and for the record i'm searching incognito so this level google doesn't know who i am i'm not signed in it's not sort of biased with my previous search history this should be what most people see on the internet when they search how to use a tablet dashboard the first hit you get is how to create a dashboard the next one is how to create a dashboard uh viewing a dashboard when you expand on that it actually goes into a menu setup for creating a dashboard again and the videos are all about creating dashboards you kind of get the picture everything here apart from this one resource from 2012 is about creating dashboards everything else is about building dashboards so in this video we're going to settle that score i'm going to show you how to use a tableau dashboard and if you've never built a dashboard you're the ideal audience if you're never going to build a dashboard you're also the ideal audience and this is really going to be a video targeted at people who don't even have to think about building dashboards but do have to use a tablet dashboard at some point in their day-to-day work i'm also going to try and keep it as simple as possible so i'm actually going to be logging in as a viewer a viewer is essentially a specific tableau license that allows you to have access to a specific set of tableau features it's the most basic license you can get and it's ideally pitched to people who just need to use dashboards to get their job done another version of this license might be something called the tableau explorer license and in this license you do get a little bit more capabilities i won't cover those in this video but if you have an explorer license you will be able to do many of the things i'm talking about here to use the dashboard as well now if i go over to my tablet online instance you can see that i'm logged in as a viewer and viewers have a very limited sort of view of tableau and they probably don't know it because for them they just know what they see and i've assumed that i'm logging in for the first time so you can see that here in this home homepage we've got this blue welcome banner and that pretty much just tells you hey you've arrived this is where analytics is served in the tablet platform and start exploring now i tend to close this straight away because it's actually getting in the way and you can see that you get a little notification here to tell you that it's gone if you want to bring that back you can click on this change settings option here and when you do that it takes you to your settings and if you scroll down all the way to the very bottom you'll see this little message here that says welcome banner tick that again save the changes and now when you go back to the home page which i'm going to click on here on the left hand side you can see the banner is back again okay so if you get rid of that and you actually want to bring it back because you don't know what it meant or you just want to read it again that's how to set it back up let me close this now for good we're not going to bring it back and now you can see we're on this page now on this page we have different sections in the middle of the page we have a recent sections here at the top recommendations just below that and if i keep going down i don't have much more now depending on your organization you might have other things available on this page and those are all essentially sort of quick links to everything we've got on the left hand side menu so on the left hand side i've got a simple menu system that allows me to go back to this page which is the home page my favorites if i've had any particular ones saved you can see i have none recent items that i've looked at or worked on things that have been shared with me explicitly by other people recommendations things that tableau thinks i should take a look at because other people like me are looking at them and then as we go further down you can see you get this little line and then we have this new area called collections again collections are just a group of content that have been grouped together from lots of different places and they've been put in one place think of it as like a folder with lots of different files or documents in them but those documents could have come from lots of different departments or lots of different parts of the organization it's just another way of sharing content explore allows me to look at everything that i can see and i have access to this is a little bit of a daunting place to go to um you have to understand a little bit about projects and folders so don't worry too much about this the best way to think of this is just imagine this as the file system for visualizations essentially each one of these projects or folders allows you to go to different parts of the business and inside of those you'll find different types of content so if i go to the samples folder here you'll see that i have four sample bits of content three of them are workbooks and one is a data source you don't need to worry too much about that but that's essentially how this all works if you find another folder in here then you just go another level into that folder and it becomes a bit like your desktop you've got folders and folders in tableau we call these projects now if i go back to the home page you can see this is where i land this is where i arrive every single time and what i can start to do is actually save some things to favorites now if you see something in your recent stab that you'd like to save into your favorites just go ahead and hit the star underneath the items if you see here i can just go ahead and hit the star and that will actually go into my favorites and you'll see that tableau creates a new section immediately showing me my favorites on the home page and this is why favoriting items is good because they appear on your home page and it's going to save you a whole ton of hassle um in the future every time you log in so i'll go back to my recents area here which has now gone further down i'll also save this overview to my favorites and i'll also go down here and i'll have a look at this rootscap and i'll save that to my favorites as well three items in my favorites we're pretty much good to go i've set everything up the way i want the other place to look just before we move into the dashboard itself is the search bar here on the top right hand side you can search for pretty much anything so you can search for people you can search for content it's just all there so in this case i'm going to search for something called an overview and you can see that when i search tableau looks across the whole entire site it gives me a nice visual uh sort of guide for what's going on and it goes and finds everything with that name in a nice clear way there is this sort of little section marker here at the top that saves me there's six views if i click on that it actually takes me to those six views and you can see that everything is set out really nicely bear in mind that in this particular page you're now in the search page so everything here is related to the search results of the thing you just searched if i go back by clicking on that we go back to the home page again so now you know how to search you know how to sort of navigate the site let's actually get to a dashboard and see how it works i'm going to click on this overview dashboard you might already have seen this on your own tableau instance it's actually the default workbook that ships with tableau and it's something that authors sometimes use for testing and capabilities now in this interface you can see the dashboard loads straight away and i have three core sections at the top i have this blue bar which is essentially just a bread uh breadcrumb bar on the left hand side it tells us where things are going and where we've come from to arrive at this piece of content and on the right hand side we have a few basic sort of controls that we can use but again don't worry too much about this we're just going to maintain our focus on the dashboard itself on the next section down you can see i have something called the toolbar and the toolbar starts to look intimidating and it's worth highlighting that you might not be able to see everything that i can see here and that is because authors the people who build your dashboards can essentially disable some of these features because they don't necessarily want you to be able to do some of these things or those experiences haven't been curated and governed properly by the organization and so that they've disabled us a good example is subscribing to this by email in some organizations the email capability has not been enabled so you can't subscribe because essentially the tableau server needs to be able to email things out if i go to the download option here you'll see that it's available but in some organizations downloading data is is sort of a taboo they don't let you download anything from any particular data visualization or anything that has access to any sort of data set so just depending on your setup the author and how everything is set up in your organization and its culture some of these settings here will not be available okay so just bear that in mind now if i go down you can see that i'm actually now in the dashboard this big title here is the title of the dashboard and basically everything below this little bar here in the middle is actually just part of your dashboard okay in some context this bar here can load at the bottom depends if you're going to an embedded view or not but if you don't find it here at the top look at the bottom sometimes that's where it is now when we get to the dashboard it's not always apparent that there's interactivity built into the dashboard most good authors should give you a guide like a pdf or a powerpoint showing you how to use the dashboard this is really good because it shows you where all the features are and it gives you a little bit of intuitive guidance about how to go about using the dashboard it shouldn't be hard to use a dashboard if you finding it hard to use a dashboard maybe have a word with your author and ask them if there's anything they can do to improve the user experience and when you do so be sure to mention the pain points for example it's hard to find this when i'm looking for this in my day-to-day work when you turn things like that the you the author typically starts to better understand what you're trying to do with something and starts to make those decisions as they build the dashboard rather than you having to wait for this whole feedback loop to go around in circles right one of the first things i'm going to do is i'm just going to go into my dashboard and i'm going to click on one of these items you can see as i hover over i get these sort of tool tips and these tool tips are great they're fascinating because they give you this sort of deep dive but in essence sometimes these are distracting um now i can't switch this off only the author can switch this on and off so again this is one of those user interactivity things that you should feedback to your author to say hey these tooltips are great but every time i hover on something they just pop up i don't want them to pop up instantly when i hover over them that's something they can change but you unfortunately can't now if i click on this particular region here in germany you can see that a couple of things happen throughout the whole visualization and in essence what i'm doing by clicking on that item is filtering the whole dashboard to that item that i've just clicked on this is known as an action actions are used by authors to enable specific interactivity like this but for you you can just think of them as a filter and with this filter all you're doing is you're clicking on the thing you'd like to filter with and it's applying that change throughout everything in the visualizations now sometimes an author won't set that to apply to everything they might only set it to apply to one chart or one set of figures it just depends on how they've set it up so if you click on something and you don't see everything else changing that's because essentially the author designed it slightly differently and again you can go back to them and ask them hey when i click on this could you make it so that it changes all these other items that i'm actually quite interested in so that's one way of filtering a dashboard it's a very simple thing you click on the data item and everything around it maybe sometimes changes depending on how the author has set it up okay this time i'm going to head to this chart here on the right hand side and you can see that i have a chart with essentially three sections one for furniture one for office supplies and one for technology if i hover over these items again you get the information in the tooltips and again this is really useful supplementary information but what i want to do is actually filter using this header item here in furniture i don't want to have to click on the data point here i want to filter on just this section across the whole entire visualization so let's see what happens if i click on that here you'll see that everything does change but notice that the numbers change but my highlight is slightly off again this is a weird sort of uh sort of design issue and again sometimes you might come across this when the author has set something up and there's a bug so again do you send feedback to an author or to someone and ask them hey i'm clicking on this thing but it's sort of grayed out the numbers now the numbers are filtering so i can actually see them correctly there if i deselect furniture here you'll see that it goes back to 96.5 if i select it again you can see that it's sort of not working the way it should so um when you see little things like this if there's something that looks unusual it's sort of hard to know what's normal and what's not normal because you might assume that this sort of behavior where everything is grayed out when you select it is how tableau works just be sure to check those items with whoever's built it normally they should have some sort of feedback mechanism and you can feed into them there now if i go to this bottom one which is broken down by segment let's deselect furniture here and go down to the bottom you can see consumer corporate and home office when i click on those and nothing happens and essentially this particular chart has not been configured to filter anything so you can see that it's just behaving uh like a static chart it's not designed to filter anything else so um when you don't find interactions that's absolutely fine but if you think they make sense uh do send that feedback on to whoever's building it so they can do that i keep saying that a lot because you start to realize that as a viewer a lot of what you'd like to do sometimes is possible but it's not actually been enabled by the author and they could also be sometimes a skills gap where the author is you know building a dashboard but maybe they're not familiar with the full feature set of tableau so again work with them and ask them hey can i add this and they might actually be able to find a way of doing it if they know that a user is going to actually use that feature so it's a good way to motivate authors to get the kind of features you want into the product now the last area on this dashboard is i'm going to go over here on the right right hand side and you can see that i have this sort of filter area now typically on a tableau dashboard you will have an area to the right or that pops up at some point on the screen that has a bunch of controls now with these controls you can essentially control the dashboard again so if you see here i've got this drop down option if i deselect all the whole entire chart goes blank because essentially i've filtered everything out by deselecting all if i just tick central then the chart here will come back but this time it's only me showing me data for central okay if i deselect central everything will go out again and if i deselect north everything comes back out again now you'll notice that that interaction takes a bit of time the reason it takes a bit of time is because tableau is an analytics tool so it's having to work with either a database or some other information to help sort of show you what you need but that means there's a little bit of thinking time between these let's say i wanted to quickly set up north and south and central i didn't have to click on those three then wait for the chart to do its thing maybe i've got a drop down with 20 items well there's actually a better way to do this what you can do as a little hack is you can go over here to the top left hand side and select this pause option what this does is it stops tableau from updating the view anytime you change something so if i now go to my region area here and i deselect central and north you can see that the chart hasn't updated to show me what's going on what it has done is it sort of grayed out the whole page to show me that hey this view needs an update so if i go over back here to the top left hand side and hit resume everything comes back and it loads and this is great when you've got maybe a drop down with 20 items and you need to select eight of them manually ad hoc this is going to save you a lot of time because if you're going through and selecting each of them one by one you're going to be increasing the amount of time it's taking because each time you change something it has to load the data and while it's doing that you kind of really can't use the visualization or the interface so that's something to be aware of now you can also see there's another item here which is a date filter now these are a bit tricky because sometimes most people think they have to use these sliders you can actually just click on them and just get a date picker straight away so don't sort of take interfaces for you know face value click around see what will happen you can't break the visualization you can't break it for anyone else this is your experience and if you want to reset anything or go back to how it was at the beginning there's a nice big fat reverb button here at the top and what that will do is it will take you back to how the visualization was loaded so if you just want to start again you've messed something up maybe the selection isn't quite right that reverb button is going to help you okay if i go back and i'm deselect an option here you can see that it goes to central and then if i go again and select north uh it's gonna go forward again and all these options are sort of being saved in tableau sort of intelligence right it's remembering these steps and i can actually go back here to the top and you can see there's an undo and redo function essentially if i undo then it takes me back a step and i can undo again and it takes me back one more step but then i can also redo by going forward i can go forward one more step and it's remembering all of these steps and every time you do that it just allows you to sort of play around with some of these options sometimes maybe things don't sort of work out the way you want and you want to go back to the previous step then forward again this lets you do that in a very very nice way now you can see that here that the the spinner sort of froze but it's essentially loaded up fine if i go to redo again you can see that it's loaded great there so everything is set up the way i wanted it to let me go back into this region filter select everything again and we'll go back to these little items here in the bottom now um the last thing you'll see here is a like a profit ratio legend this is actually linked to the performance on this map so sometimes the legends and the information you need is not necessarily next to the visualization or next to what you need again if the chart has been well documented this shouldn't be a problem um you can see there's also a profit ratio filter here and if i slide this a little bit you can see that it works just as you'd expect but i can also go in there and type it now the thing with percentages here is that notice that it's it's sort of displaying it as 47 or let's click out of this 7-72 but when i go to type it it's actually the uh numerical value that i need to type in so mine is 71.5 so if i wanted to change this to 75 minus 75 i just hit minus 0.75 and there we go okay the last thing i'm going to show is this export button here at the very bottom now when i click on the export button uh the author's actually built something in for me that allows me to export a section of this data and depending on um what i can see and what i can't see i'm actually get this ability to do this so i can say specific sheets from this dashboard specific sheets from this workbook so let's say uh sheets from this workbook you can see that i'm on the overview here so i'm going to select that i'm going to hit download and what it actually does is it gives me a nice image so let's go ahead and look at this now it's actually giving me a powerpoint presentation rather than an image and the authors bake this into the settings so now when i open that in powerpoint you can see that it opens up and it's called export test and there's my chart my images and powerpoint ready to go for whatever meeting i need it for and so this is a nice way of going to your dashboard setting everything up making sure it's perfect then hitting that export button for the pdf if it's an option and being able to sort of go from there now what if the author hasn't given you that button is there another way to do this absolutely if you close powerpoint here and we just go back to the view and we go back to our toolbar you'll notice that we have a host of items here across the top so let's start going through those if i click on the first one on the right hand side you can see that allows me to go full screen very handy in case i'm in the presentation and i need to show people a chart or i need the focus of the meeting to just be the chart really really nice feature to have if i click on that little x at the top of the screen again it goes back so you see this little sort of square icon here if i click on that it goes back to how i had it before really cool if i've been given the ability to i can actually leave comments for other people so i can say hey at tim this looks great um let's chat about this and when i do that um i can also attach what exactly what i'm looking at here so if i go in here and just deselect north let's say that i'm looking at the central and south region and i think this looks great if i click on this little paperclip and square it's actually going to take a snapshot of this and save it with a comment you can see that it just loads it up here on the bottom right hand side and now when i post this comment it's a bit like taking a snapshot and adding it to the comment and now this is visible it also sends a notification to that person by email or via slack if they have that set up and they're able to click on that and come directly here and see the exact same thing that you've clicked just to show you what that looks like let me revert this back to the very beginning i'm going to close this comment tab so you can't see any comments go back in open the comments tab so that you can see comments and notice that the region here selected to all i'll go back out and hit view and you can see that it loads that old view back and now you can see central and south are selected so now that's a really really good way to share information with other people and both on slack and here inside of tableau as well now the next feature is the download function so when you click on this you get a range of other settings you get image the data which is grayed out i'll explain that in a second crosstab pdf powerpoint and tableau workbook now as a viewer you can't download the tablet workbook that's not allowed but you can download all the other options an image will give you exactly that let's have a go at that let's collect an image and when you do that you get again this option of where to save it if i hit it to the desktop click click on that you can see that the image loads up straight away here in windows perfect if i go back go to download this time you'll see that the data is greyed out okay and if you see this little tool tip it says click the view to enable data and cross crosstab download this is not really that clear what it actually means is look tableau doesn't know which data set you'd like to download and so it wants you to click on a chart or in the visualization and it's going to use that to download the data so this time let me do this let me click on this chart and for the record it looks like i'm clicking in white space that is exactly what i'm doing i'm going to click in that white space you didn't even see anything happen on screen now i go to download and you can see oh still nothing there okay very very bizarre now if i click on office supplies there go back to download you can see the data does appear so it wants me to click on something very specific okay you have to click on some sort of element of grouping a header something on a map for it to grab the data if i wanted to click on everything if i wanted to select furniture technology and office supplies what i could do is i could select the axis here for example and then go back to download and you can see the data option is open as well or i could hold ctrl and select each of these items notice that as i do that it's firing off the actions and filtering everything and now if i go to download you can see the data is there again so if i click on data what it's going to do is give me the summary of the data so it's not going to give me the full data that's not allowed unless you're an explorer who has explicit access to download the full set of data but it does give me the summary of the data and it gives me the first 200 rows as an example if i download all the rows as a text file it opens it up it actually generates a csv let's save that to my desktop let's open that in excel and boom there we go we've got the file in excel and you can see it's got a little bit of the formatting um as well that it's picked up from tableau and now i can use this data to do whatever i need to do i hate showing people that feature because essentially that's literally becomes the biggest use case for this it's really frustrating um but yeah that's just sort of how how it is sometimes so if you go back to this dashboard you can see that's how to download data now if i go back to the download option we've also got a crosstab so let's go ahead and click crosstab you'll see that it then asks me which chart that i wanted to cross it will then ask me which chart i want the crosstab from and also which file so this is a bit like the option we've just used except for this actually lets you choose which chart it's going to come from so i'm going to choose the sales map and i'd like it to come out as an excel last time i did csv now i'm going to choose excel we're going to save it to the desktop open up that file and here we go and you can see we get a crosstab now the crosstab was probably the worst format here because it's got the countries and of course some of these cities are only going to be available in one of these countries you know you can't have antwerp in austria germany and italy just doesn't exist so crotch tab wasn't the best format here maybe a summary data set would have been the better thing so just bear that in mind the thing you're downloading isn't ideally easy to across tab don't use the crosstab use something like the summary view and just go ahead and download the data like this so if i click here on the map i can go to the data and you can see the summary data is in a much better format i even get the lattice as long as you can go off and use that in a much better way so just think about what you're downloading and how you want it to sort of work let me just close this tab here and let's go back to the download option if i click it again there's an option to grab a pdf now what i always say to people is that it's so tempting to choose a paper size on this page don't do that never choose a paper size in this setting i know it sounds counter-intuitive and you might want to print an a4 or something like that but here's the thing pdf file format already handles this for you when you go to print so there's no need to define it here in tableau just go ahead to this drop down and choose unspecified choose your orientation and landscape or portrait whatever one you want to use landscape would work better with this particular one i want to download this particular view you can select specific sheets from this dashboard or you can just go ahead and do anything i'll show you how to use this in a little bit more detail shortly and this is a bit of scaling again just set it to automatic because we've chosen an unspecified paper size this is generally the best setting to use i'll show you why if i hit download tableau will think about it it will generate the pdf and there it is there's my pdf let's open that and you can see it opens it up for me here in chrome because this is my default sort of pdf viewer when i'm just on my desktop if you've got something like adobe acrobat it will open it in that instead now what i can do over here in the print settings is i can of course specify my paper sizes specifically for the printer that i want and the settings are endless here okay you don't need to specify this in tablet the other thing you'll get when you do this is you'll get a file that is much much higher resolution so if i just zoom in here notice how crisp the text stays all the way through that's because it's basically a vector item now the map doesn't do the same thing maps are pretty hard to sort of keep consistent because of the way all this is done but if i was to zoom in again and let's go all the way to the right you can see that even the charts stay crisp and nice and detailed if you set a paper size and you try and do the same thing you don't always get consistently the same quality as you zoom in or you make things larger so again unspecified as a paper size um is going to give you the highest level of detail in that pdf and you're going to be fine so let's go back out go to download again and the last one is powerpoint we've already seen an example of this so let's select this view download uh we'll do another export test open it up again and this is what our button was doing essentially was creating one of these for us without having to use the button so in essence you can see that the button here is quite handy because it gives me a specific feature but on the other hand this download option gives me all the features i could want so you don't necessarily need to have it built into the dashboard if it's been enabled you'll be able to do it over here as well now you might see this interface for choosing this view or specific sheets from this dashboard or specific sheets from this workbook essentially this is talking about which specific item you want to download and you can kind of see that you get this sort of uh different choice the different choices as you go through now the only one to really talk about is specific sheets from this dashboard this will give you each of these charts as their own thing so if i go in here for example and i select the cells map and then we say unspecified remember automatic and we can choose a landscape for this i think that's going to be better for the map hit download and what it will give me is just essentially that sales map and it's a nice way for me to sort of isolate that and just see what's going on so if you wanted to do that and you wanted to generate that that's how to do it it's really super easy you don't need to sort of stress too hard about it okay so that's everything in the download option it's pretty thorough you're going to be pretty much set the next option is the share option if i go ahead and click on that i get this nice interface i can then go ahead and tag a colleague here so i can say hey tim uh what's going on now in this particular setup um you can see that i can just actually just type a username i was treating it like a comment you don't need to do that at all i can just go ahead and type a name and it will find that person i can you know go ahead and type their email or if i know their uh enterprise id i can sometimes even type that and again it will find them absolutely fine the user is going to need to be part of the tableau server that's how it knows their name essentially so if you try and type someone's name in here and they don't exist on the tableau server it won't come up so therefore you won't be able to share it with them what you could do is you could copy this link though and send it to them in an email and then when they get access to tableau they'll then be able to click on that link and get the access if they've got the access to see that particular item so if you want to send something to someone preemptively because you know they're joining the organization copying this link and putting in an email will be a nice way to do that and then once they arrive you can maybe come back and share a bunch of things with them but that's just sort of a mechanic you have to work around and see what's best for you and your organization let me close the share view and i'll go back to this option here which is subscribe now if emails have been set up you can actually have this view on this dashboard land in your inbox every single week or however often you want the first thing to do is to choose what you want to see this particular view or the entire workbook the entire workbook will go and get everything so not just this specific tab i'm on but every other tab this dashboard only has one tab so we don't need to worry too much but if i go back to this view this is going to be all that i get the format i can have is an image a pdf and both so this is a really nice thing to have so i'm going to choose a pdf in this particular case because if something's interesting i'd like to be able to forward it and i think a pdf sometimes works a little bit better in that instance remember what i said about paper size never choose to paper size go to unspecified choose your uh format create a subject and call this a weekly report and uh you can add an additional message and then you can pick a schedule okay now the schedule um you can you can pick here on a selected schedule or when data refreshes okay now these are sort of two options and they sort of don't make sense unless you've used tableau for a while essentially the data in tableau can refresh on the schedule the author worries about this you don't need to worry about it the author worries about this you don't need to worry about it but why this is useful is that sometimes in organizations the data is not refreshed that often because essentially it doesn't change that often so if a data is only maybe changing once a week then you might be better off choosing this option here but you need to make sure that the data source does actually refresh because otherwise the first time you get this you'll get it and then you won't ever get anything again until it updates and so some people it's actually quite nice to have this schedule selected because then even if the data hasn't updated they're still getting that ping and it prompts them to go and say hey why hasn't this data been updated in two weeks now if i scroll down to the bottom you'll see a schedule this is largely set up by your admin now your admin is the person who controls the whole entire tableau server they set up these schedules and you can essentially pick from the schedules depending on what's going on now a lot of these are actually pretty smart so you can go in here and choose weekly hourly whatever you want to do and this is sort of set up for you to do whatever you want and the data updates are done on a completely different schedule those are sort of set in stone so this this scheduling is actually quite powerful you can go in and set whatever you want but just bear in mind that you might be getting uh email updates at a different frequency to how the data is being updated that's why this option here to use the data refresh is there but again like i said if you want the prompt then just get it at the same time every week let's say a weekday daily uh every monday tuesday another sunday wednesday thursday friday i can choose this specific time so let's go ahead and choose what should we choose here let's choose 9 am in the morning let's say 9 10 in the morning just after i've signed in and you can see the time zone that it's using for this as well and there's a little link at the bottom to go manage the subscriptions i won't click on that and deviate of course but if you do click on that you can go and see all the things you've subscribed to and delete them from one place if you want to manage that it's a bit like unsubscribing from emails there's an interface place for that to do so if i go ahead and hit subscribe you can see that i get this little notification at the top saying i've created a subscription and we're pretty much good to go metrics is super cool in this particular setup i'm a viewer so i can't create any metrics so if someone has created a metric i can view the metrics there and there's not much to say about this other than essentially a metric allows you to track one particular kpi from a dashboard it always has to come from a dashboard say let's say you wanted to track furniture sales you could ask an explorer or someone who has an elevated access to create a metric linked to the furniture cells essentially they'd click on this item and then this furniture value here would show up here as a line item okay so that's something really useful to be aware of um let me just quickly enable one so you can see what it looks like okay so i'm going to refresh this and just like that we should have a metric available okay so i'm just going to go to my metrics tab and you can see voila i have a metric and now this metric here is specifically tracking the sales of furniture and it's not tracking the yellow item it's tracking the blue items just the sales and you can see the current value today is down 24.28 percent um and i think this is uh from a specific value if i actually click on it you see it takes me off to view so it's basically saying that it's down from november 2019 and that change there is uh 24.28 as i hover over it you can kind of see the number changing over time but it's connected to this visualization you can't create them just off some other data set has to be based on the visualization item and again you can't create this as a viewer only an explorer or a creator can actually go in and create these and set these up so if you want to use these make sure someone is setting them up for you so that you can do that okay let's close that go back and you can set up alerts on a particular dashboard now to set up an alert you need to do a couple of things okay now if i click on this axis here you'll see that i have nothing set up here and you'll see that it's not letting me do anything now again now just like metrics alerts need to be set up for you by an explorer so let me go ahead and set up an alert on this page and then we're going to see what it looks like now the reason i can't see any is because the author hasn't actually enabled them for me so whoever's created the alert hasn't set it up for me to see so what i've done in the background is i've changed that so i've now gone and enabled those alerts to be visible to other people and if i go ahead and refresh this again and i go back into the alert section you can see that i can now see an alert and what i can do is i can add myself to it so if i know there's an alert there that someone is set up i can already see who a recipient is i can add myself to that alert and you can see that i've been added when i do that i get this actions tab here where i can remove myself from that action and alert as well so it's a really good nice thing to be able to do if you see an alert that you find useful again set it up now it's sort of strange because of the viewer this should be something you should be able to set up for whatever reason um it's not a current capability so if you want to be able to set these up and use these ask someone on an explorer or create a license to create them for you and then you're going to be in a good spot go back to this top item here which is called view original now this is called a custom view remember earlier on when we went into regions we had central and south ticked what if that's the only thing i care about and every time i come to this dashboard i don't want to have to reselect these two things so what i can do is i can actually go to this little view option here and i can name this north and south and i can actually make it my defaults every time i come to this visualization it loads this north and south version first okay i'm going to hit save and what it does is it actually creates a nice version just for me and i can know that if i look at the url here you can see that it's gone really really long and the other thing to know is that this little tab here saying view north and south has changed to tell me that i'm looking at a different version of the same thing if i click on it i can actually go back to the original one you can see the original one was created by me of course if i click on that it takes me back to the default one so if you want to go back to what everyone else is looking at you can and if i go here and i select my version you can see that it loads up there just fine now you can see that it is a default so what that means is if i go back out to let's say this export test tab here and i go back into my overview it's going to look at my credentials and it's going to figure out that hey i'm tim and i actually prefer the north and south version every single time and it actually tells me up here so this is what this is actually for essentially you're saving a custom view for yourself based on the original visualization to save you having to go and change a bunch of filters and do a bunch of things that you don't need to do if i go back and i go back into the original one you'll also see things like the filters and the order dates are completely different where i go if i go back into the north and south you can see the order date and profit ratio are set up slightly differently as well so it's a nice way of saving these things and sort of looking at them in the future now the last one uh here is going to be data changes this essentially notifies you if there have been any changes to the data or in the dashboard and this is basically based on analysis now um at this moment in time this is still a fairly new feature so don't worry too much about this i'll probably cover this in a separate video but just to be aware more and more features can get added to this toolbar over time so as this video ages so will its currency so be sure to check out other videos on my channel to find out more about things like this as and when they're announced the last thing is the data details so when i click on this i get a little bit of metadata about the data being used here so you can see that i can see that this is in this workbook it's in the samples project the author was me and the exact date it was modified it was modified a few minutes ago because i changed the alerts and the settings and i can actually see the data source that it's connected to so you can see here it's connected to sample ee superstore if i scroll down i even get a view of the individual metrics so i can go into profit ratio for example and i can see what the calculation looks like so as a viewer this is really nice because if i have any doubts about how something's been done and that metadata is available in tableau i can actually get to the bottom of that so i can see here how the profit ratio is calculated and i can actually select something called view more it takes me off to another place where i can actually see something called the lineage now in this particular setup because i'm a viewer i'm actually getting a few sort of errors here but nonetheless nonetheless this is quite useful because i can actually start to understand more about what's going on with my data set but again this is a for another day don't worry too much about this um i just wanted to show you that you can dig into these features a bit more if i keep going down you can see that other fields are also available if i look at my order dates um you can see there's nothing there because no description or anything has been set up ideally authors should be setting these up as well so be sure to make sure that if you want these descriptions and you think they're useful make sure the author is setting them up appropriately when they're creating the workbook so that's pretty much everything in the toolbar and everything in the dashboard the key thing to remember is that essentially really try and lean on any guides that have been created for the dashboard that's going to be the fastest way to find out what the dashboard can do and what the interface items can do i've only shown you a fraction of the interface items there's so many more available things like parameters set actions parameter actions all these are fantastic features that authors use to make things really interactive and smart but they do require a little bit of awareness and so the author really needs to tell you exactly what they do and how to use them because if you use them incorrectly then they can actually break your visualizations as well so be sure to check that out okay this has been a long video i hope you find it useful i really hope i'm not the only one who makes videos about how to use a tableau dashboard i'm sure other people will be making them as well if i've missed anything in this video or maybe there's something blatantly obvious that you think should be in this video let me know and i'm sure we can make another video to fill the gap but thank you for watching and if it's the first time you found the channel be sure to subscribe like and let me know what you'd like to see more of about tableau um if you're brand new to tableau check out my explainer on tableau it's had over a quart actually no yeah it's on its way to half a million views on youtube which is crazy so if you haven't seen it be sure not to miss out on that and check it out as well thanks for watching and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Tableau Tim

Views: 1,176

Keywords: tableau, desktop, salesforce, version, tableau prep, tableau online, tableau prep builder, tableau dashboard, tableau dashboard design, tableau dashboard examples, tableau dashboard actions, tableau dashboard tutorial, tableau dashboard ideas, how to use a tableau dashboard, how to tableau dashboard, using a tableau dashboard, why use tableau dashboard

Id: s_uDUmIUeWA

Length: 42min 26sec (2546 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021