Tableau Dashboards | 7 Practical Tips and Tricks | Tiled, Floating, Containers, Formatting, Colors

in this video we'll look at seven important dashboarding tips and tricks that you should consider when you're creating your tableau dashboards i'll see you in a bit i've gone ahead and created a sample dashboard we will use this as the basis of our discussion when we're talking about the tips and tricks for dashboarding in this video we'll talk about the considerations but i will have a different video where i will walk you through end to end how to create some basic dashboards the first tip is really more of a foundational knowledge on how we place things in tableau when you create a new dashboard in your sidebar you're going to see the objects that you can add to your dashboard so you have your sheets and you also have additional objects other than the worksheets or the charts that you've created one thing to note is that when we place new objects into your dashboard they can be placed either as tiled or floating at any point in time you can toggle between these two but it's better to plan ahead and figure out exactly how you want to place your objects a tiled placement means any of the objects you're going to place on screen will snap to grid and all of the objects that you've added plus anything else that's already there all of them will take up a hundred percent of the space for example if we drag profit by state when we drag this over you can see that the graph takes up majority of the space but on the right hand side you actually do have all of this space although it looks like white space all of this still takes up 100 of the space so between the chart and the legend this whole column all of it takes up a hundred percent of the space when you drag over another chart for example and here we have a profit timeline this chart will be placed wherever the gray area is but that is also taking into account all of the objects that are already on screen so again it's going to snap to place and this new chart plus whatever that comes with it will take up a hundred percent of the space so looking at this profit by state takes up that much profit timeline takes up this much you have these legends and filters they're actually contained in another box and all of these objects together they take up a hundred percent of the space now the floating components behave differently the floating components do not snap to grid they don't compete for space in the background we can place floating components into your dashboard by either clicking on this option or you can also press shift and then add that component for example i can click on floating and drag menu over and you can see in here that the shaded area is not snapping to grid it doesn't compete for space for the charts that are already tiled it is sitting on top of whatever is in your background or whatever is in your tiled note that i can also keep my default placement as tiled and whenever i want to add floating components i can simply press shift and drag a new chart over at any point in time i want to float an item i can simply select that item so for example profit by state on the drop down there will also be an option for floating what we need to keep in mind for tiled is that all components that you place will compete with the space from the background and what this means is tablet will make the necessary adjustments it will nudge all other components and they may go out of place the caution about floating items is any of the floating items it's like it's pinned to that place and if you have components that are automatically readjusting your floating items might become out of place so these are just some main considerations when you're deciding to place things as tiled or as floating so the difference between how you are able to control tiled and floating components it's manifested in the layout tab of your sidebar if you have a tiled component you're going to find under the layout tab the position and the size although you see these numbers the up and down arrows are actually disabled you are not able to change the exact values of the x and y positions or the width or the height however if we decide let's say to make this map floating so go to the drop down click on floating all of a sudden you're going to see that these options are now enabled you can either type in the exact values or click on the up and down arrow to change the values but this also means that this particular chart is now pinned only to that place regardless of whatever else happens in the background the second tip is all about containers so what are containers in your sidebar you're going to see two objects you have a horizontal container and a vertical container you can think of these as invisible boxes that allow you to organize any of the objects that you want to place into your dashboard it could be charts could be text could be images so let's say we've already sketched out how we want our dashboard to look like say we want to have a header item maybe we want to have a chart in here maybe a couple charts right here and maybe another footer at the bottom but at the very top you also want to have three different components inside this is where we can really take advantage of layout containers it will help us organize our objects so let's demonstrate some of these so for example in here i want to start with a vertical container because i want to stack things on top of each other so we can simply drag that over now another thing to note is that containers have a blue border this is an important distinction because the blue borders give you options specific for the container it allows you to work with the container however some of the other objects that you place for example a chart let's say this profit by state when you drag this over and you select that specific component what you're going to see is a gray border and the gray border has very different options than a blue border or then a containers options so just something to keep in mind so let me just undo this first so we already have our layout container and if you want to know more how tableau places things and how it structures things you can also go to the layout tab in your sidebar so here you have an item hierarchy so you can kind of see where things are placed so let's try to create at least the header section of what we've sketched out and for now i'm actually just going to place some blanks first so it gives me some indication of the type of layout container i have and from here we know that the header will have components that are side by side and that's going to be a horizontal container so we drag this over and let's say in here we drag an image for our logo let's fit this image now the other mini tip in here even though i have dragged over a horizontal container if i accidentally place the text on top it becomes a vertical container so the placement of the object takes precedence over the type of container that you dragged over so here let me just drag it over to the side making sure that we're typing in our executive dashboard and perhaps we want to add another worksheet to the side and anything you don't need just take them away and we can take out the top blank object that we've added as a placeholder you can also set the height and the width of any of the objects that you have on screen so for example in here if you click on the drop down for more options you can actually edit the image you can also fix the width fix the height the third tip is all about the formatting options you have for the components in your dashboard for example this profit by state if i select this and if i go to the layout tab note that i have options to add borders if i want to add a background color if i want to or remove it all together i can add padding or spacing either within the container or right outside the container so inner or outer padding and just to show you how this works if we wanted to add a border in here we can add a border make that really thick maybe a different color you can kind of see that border if we wanted to add a background making sure that that component is still selected maybe in here change this to a bright yellow background color you can also if you want to make this background transparent so you can drop down the opacity just in case you have a background image that you want to show through your chart now you can also adjust the outer padding and outer padding is the space that you have outside of your border so for example if we decide to increase it you can see that the white space between the border and the next item over increases the inner padding is the space from the border to your chart so in this case if we try to increase this you can see that there's going to be more space and now the background color is actually showing through the fourth tip is all about missing objects by default when you drag a sheet over it's actually going to bring all of the objects that are visible at the sheet level into your dashboard so in this case we have our chart and we also have our legend but let's say at some point you go back to the profit timeline and then you add a new filter in here so let's say show filter for week when you go back to the dashboard it doesn't automatically update and show the new filters that you're showing in your sheet and you might be inclined to think oh you just have to remove this and then re-add it and you don't have to because you can add any of the objects at any point so in here when you click on the object click on the drop down and remember in here we're selecting a sheet so you have the dark gray border in here at any point in time you can add your legends you can add your filters you can add your highlighters you don't have to remove the object and re-add them just to be able to show those filters so in this case if i wanted to add that new filter go to filters and then add the week of order date i hope you're finding this video useful so far and if you haven't subscribed yet please consider subscribing i publish weekly videos on data related topics now tip number five is really all about polish and there's a lot of things to consider but i'll just give you a few things to think about for example tool tips decide if you need tool tips in here i have a worksheet that has images because i use this for filtering so in here if i click on any of these icons it actually filters my charts however leaving the tooltip here is really confusing so my suggestion if you don't need the tooltips do not show them so where you can take away these tooltips when you go back to that original sheet and from here tooltip just unselect the show tooltips now you have other options you may decide to show the tooltip but not show the command buttons so that's totally up to you but if you don't need the tooltips do not show them if you do need to show the tooltips my recommendation is at least format it so right now there's more and more people that are familiar with tableau and that number will just increase now the tooltips are nice however at some point especially if you've been working with tableau a lot or if you've been seeing a lot of dashboards already this tooltip where you have the label colon value it feels so mechanical it feels like there hasn't been any thought that's been put into this dashboard so my recommendation is do a little bit of formatting a little formatting goes a long way the third thing i will recommend you consider all the time will be grid lines personally i take away the grid lines and i only add it if i know it's needed for reference i feel that simple step already polishes your chart under format lines this is where you can take away your grid lines either for the whole sheet maybe for rows or maybe for columns the next tip i have is all about branding there are a lot of visual best practices on what colors to use how to use colors making sure that you take into account color blindness and how different colors might come across however another big consideration is branding if a company's color is green or red or purple or whatever that color is we have to work with them so in the example that i have in here this fictional company has a green tree for color so i will have to work with these colors if i want to create a branded dashboard for this company now if the company already has a set of colors that they can use then we want to ask for those colors however if you don't have those colors ready one alternative you have is to use a tool that gives you different sets of colors based on maybe an image now interworks has created a fantastic tool i've been using this for a lot of years this is called the color tool for tableau so you can pick your own colors and then and then add them here and it will generate different kinds of color palettes for you but if you do have an image we can simply drag and drop that image onto this tool so for example in here i can simply drag this logo over and it will generate a color palette for me and from here i can also just call this you know the brand name so let's say green tree brand and what it generates on the right hand side is actually a tableau preferences file now if you already have the entries to this tableau preferences file you simply just want to add the color palette options you simply want to copy and paste these to that file however if you don't have a preferences file yet you can copy all of the contents into your new file i will put a link down below there is documentation and tutorial on how to add your own color palette from the tableau website and it's a very complete reference but just to show you what it looks like in my environment so in here in my tableau repository i have created a preferences.tps file it's simply a text file that has a different file extension and if i open this up this is what it looks like so you want to save this file and it's not going to be visible right away if you have tableau open so you do need to restart your tableau instance but once you restart your tableau instance so let's say in here let's go to this worksheet and if i wanted to edit these colors if you click on the color property in your markz card and if you edit the colors you will be able to see the new colors that you've generated from this tool and last but not least tip for dashboarding i think this is really critical especially for dashboards that are already deployed to production and continuously used by the business is making sure that you have an indication of how fresh or how outdated your dashboard is in a lot of the dashboards that i create i will provide the source of the data and also the last time that data was refreshed and you can decide where this needs to go it could be in a footer it could be in your header as long as you're consistent but how do we add this what you can do is you can create a single worksheet we're simply going to change the title so double click on the title and then here we can probably type in data source and then in the insert drop down you can add your data source name and you can also specify when the last time this data source has been refreshed so from here insert data update time and you can put this worksheet in your dashboard again as a footer or as a header now one interesting thing about this particular worksheet is this requires at least one field from your data source because otherwise it doesn't know which data source you're talking about if you had 10 of them and it doesn't know which time it's supposed to display so in here i've simply created a calculated field that has nothing it's just a blank i'm going to drag it over to text and this already is enough indication to tableau to figure out which data source and which time stamp i want to include so these are my seven tips some of them are shorter than others i hope you found this video useful i hope these are considerations that you can take to your work take to your projects especially if you're creating them for clients for your employers for your managers i will have additional videos on dashboarding thank you so much for watching i will see you again next time

Channel: sqlbelle

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Keywords: tableau dashboards, tableau dashboard, tableau dashboard tips, tableau dashboard best practice, tableau design tips, tableau dashboard tips and tricks, tableau dashboard design, tableau dashboard tutorial, tableau dashboard layout design, tableau dashboard examples, tableau dashboard containers, tableau dashboard best practices, tableau dashboard formatting, tableau dashboard design tips, how to design a tableau dashboard, tableau tips and tricks, best tableau tips and tricks

Id: Ja5O6f3dnRM

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020