Practical Tableau

Chapter 49. Three Ways to Add Alerts to Your Dashboards

One of the biggest advantages to using a tool like Tableau is that the software can do much of the “heavy lifting” for you. For example, you can build in logic to improve the usability of your dashboards once, and have it work for you or your end users from that point on. One application of this is to add alerts to your dashboards that help communicate notifications or insights.

You may want to use alerts to notify users or remind yourself that a certain filter is on. Perhaps you have specific performance thresholds that are tolerable to your business, but want to be alerted somehow if performance is ever higher or lower than expected. Adding alerts to your dashboards helps reduce the time to insight and elicit action that helps your business—the primary goal of analytics. This chapter will cover three different examples of dashboard alerts.

Alert 1: Date Settings

The first type of alert that I frequently use in my own dashboards communicates which dates are being displayed and, if I’m using a line graph, how finely the dates are aggregated (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). This alert serves two key purposes: (a) it clearly communicates how current the dataset is, and (b) helps avoid confusion in the case that the dataset has not updated or a view doesn’t look as expected due to the aggregation. Here is an example using the Sample – Superstore data:

To create this alert, simply start a new worksheet and make a text-based ...