Creating Your First Tableau Dashboard: A Beginner’s Guide
Do you want to be data-driven but lack coding skills? Tableau offers a solution. With its intuitive interface, it enables users to craft insightful visualizations effortlessly. This guide will walk you through building your first Tableau dashboard, demonstrating its versatility and potential to showcase your data visualization skills effectively. I guarantee that after following this guide, you’ll be ready to create your own dashboard.
Contents of this article
- What is Tableau?
- Setting up Tableau
- Connecting Data Sources
- Building Visualizations
- Building Dashboard
1. What is Tableau?
Tableau is a visual analytics platform transforming the way we use data to solve problems — empowering people and organizations to make the most of their data. (from Tableau website)
Tableau is one of the most famous tools for data visualization. From Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2023, Tableau is one of the leaders in this field which is side by side with Microsoft Power BI (I also provide many tips for those who want to try the Microsoft Power BI tool).
You can create a dashboard that visualizes your data as many graphs and share this interactive dashboard with others to help in business decisions.
Key Features:
- Drag-and-drop functionality for easy visualization creation.
- Support for various data sources including Excel, CSV, databases, and cloud services.
- Interactive dashboards and visualizations to engage viewers.
- Advanced analytics and forecasting tools.
- Seamless integration with Tableau Public and Tableau Server for online sharing and collaboration.
2. Setting up Tableau
It’s time for hands-on experience. First of all, you need to download and install Tableau from Tableau's official website. After you fill out the form, you can download and install Tableau for free.
After installation, you can open the Tableau program. Then, you may face something like this if you or your company don’t have a Tableau license. Click “Start trial now” and enter your email and you can now use Tableau. This free version has the limitation that you can publish only on Tableau Cloud which means that everyone can access your data, so if your data is credentialed, it is better to try the free version and consider buying a license.
3. Connecting Data Sources
Now, you are ready to tackle the real data.
A tableau dashboard can connect to data sources and when the data sources are updated, the dashboard will automatically update as set schedule set. This feature ensures that the dashboard reflects the most recent data without manual intervention.
Supported data sources including Excel, CSV, databases (SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.), cloud platforms (Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, etc.), and web data connectors.
On your left pane, you can select the data source that you would like to use for your dashboard.
In this article, I will connect to the csv file (you can think of it as a text file that can be opened using Excel) that can be downloaded from the Tableau website. This data set is for estimating the burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors globally and for 21 regions for 1990 and 2010.
I select “Text file” and find the downloaded file I would like to connect.
You will find the page that shows the data you connect to. For simplicity, just focus on only 2 parts for now:
1. Data column name and type will list all columns in the data set. You should change the type of each column to be an appropriate type since it can affect the chart type in your dashboard.
2. Data preview is used to check that you connect to the correct data source.
After you make sure that your data source is ready. It’s time for data visualization! Click on “Sheet 1” in the bottom left corner to switch to the data visualization page. You can return to the Data Source page at any time by clicking on the Data Source tab near the “Sheet 1” tab.
4. Building Visualizations
There are 4 parts I would like you to familiarize first on this “Sheet 1” worksheet:
1. Data pane: list of all data columns from the data source.
2. Mark pane: adjust color, size, text, detail, and tooltip on the visualization.
3. Column and row panes: select which data to use as a row or column.
4. White area: the visualization will be shown here
To make a visualization, Drag the fields you want to use for your visualization onto the Rows and Columns shelves to define the structure of your visualization.
For example, I drag the Year to the Columns shelf and the Number of Deaths to the Rows shelf. I will get a visualization as shown below. The X-axis is year and the Y-axis is the total number of deaths each year. (It is not the correct total number of deaths yet, but I will assume that it is to make it less complicated.)
After this, I will show how to adjust this graph.
- Don’t want to show the total number of deaths but want to show the maximum number of deaths from 1 country instead.
Hover on the Number of deaths on the Rows shelf and click on the down arrow. Then, select Measure > Maximum.
- Want a bar chart instead
Select the Bar chart on the Mark pane.
- Want to see how many deaths from each country.
Select the Bar chart on the Mark pane. Then, drag the Country Name from the data pane to Color.
- Want to see the number of deaths each year.
Drag the Number of Deaths from the data pane to Label.
- Want to change the line chart color to orange
Click on Color on the Mark pane and select orange color
These are just some simple examples of how to change your visualization. Have fun exploring and learning
After you finish the visualization, it is not a dashboard yet because a dashboard usually consists of several visualizations not just one. In the next final step, I will show how to combine many visualizations into 1 dashboard.
5. Building Dashboard
In step 4, you learned how to make a visualization on a worksheet.
A dashboard in Tableau can have lots of pages, and each page usually has many visualizations from worksheet in step 4.
You can change how the visualizations are arranged on the dashboard as illustrated in the image below. Also, when users click on one visualization, it can change what you see in other visualizations on that page.
To create a dashboard, follow these 4steps
- Click on the new worksheet button on the bottom of the screen to create a new worksheet, “Sheet 2”. Then, create a visualization on this worksheet.
- Click on the new dashboard button to create a new worksheet,
3. Go to the Dashboard 1 tab. Then, drag Sheet 1 and Sheet 2 on the left-hand side to the large white space in the center of the screen. You can drag as many worksheets as you want to show on the dashboard page and rearrange them as you need.
4. Publish your dashboard for other people to play with it. Click on the Share button on the upper part of the program.
After following these 4 steps, your dashboard should be ready to access via the website.
Conclusion
Congratulations on completing your journey through “Creating Your First Tableau Dashboard: A Beginner’s Guide”! You’ve learned the basics of Tableau and how to make your own dashboards. Now you can turn data into clear pictures that tell a story.
But this is just the start. Keep practicing and trying new things with Tableau. The more you play around, the more you’ll learn.
So, keep exploring, keep creating, and enjoy making sense of your data with Tableau!
Hope this article is useful for you. Please clap and follow me for more data science articles. Feel free to ask if you have any questions.
Happy dashboard making!
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