Chapter 13. Building Dashboards
ââData! Data! Data!â he cried impatiently. âI canât make bricks without clay.ââ
In this chapter, letâs return to the analogy we used in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1 and compare the act of communicating data with building a structure. As the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes relates emphatically in this chapterâs epigraph, the raw material that weâre using is data.
Now, neither we nor our audience have Holmesâ superior powers of deduction, so we need to take the raw material and build a suitable structure in order to facilitate discovery. And if the data is the clay, then the bricks are the individual charts and graphs, and the overall structure is the dashboard.
Building a dashboard that communicates data well doesnât happen all at once. It requires some creative thought and diligent crafting. And like all creative processes, the process of building a data dashboard is rarely linear. There is typically a great deal of reworking and fine-tuning throughout.
That being said, it is useful to identify the different activities involved in creating dashboards in Tableau, and the general order in which they occur:
- Design
Make a few rough sketches of dashboard layouts that use your data to help you accomplish your overall goal, taking into consideration the medium and channel that you will use to deliver the final version to your audience.
- Sheets
Build each ...
Get Communicating Data with Tableau now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.