Tableau Dashboard Cookbook

Over 40 recipes for designing professional dashboards by implementing data visualization principles

About This Book

• Utilize the features of Tableau to create, design, and develop effective, beautiful dashboards
• Use data visualization principles to help you to design dashboards that enlighten and support business decisions
• Explore Tableau's functionality with practical lessons that help you to build your own solution as you progress through the book

Who This Book Is For

If you are a business user or developer who wants to use Tableau to create dashboards that use data visualization theory and techniques, this is the book for you. Whether you are new to Tableau or an expert, with this book you will be able to master data visualization and put it into practice, creating Tableau dashboards that make a difference in your organization.

What You Will Learn

• Customize your designs to meet the needs of your business using Tableau
• Use Tableau to prototype, develop, and deploy the final dashboard
• Communicate and share your dashboards internally within the business, or externally with the rest of the world via Tableau public
• Integrate your data to provide mashed-up dashboards
• Be inspired with color, motion, and other design tricks when designing dashboards
• Formulate your business rules into Tableau formulae that you can reuse
• Consider your business users and data consumer needs as you learn about color theory and psychology and put them into action

In Detail

With increasing interest and enthusiasm for data visualization in the media, businesses are looking to create effective dashboards that engage as well as communicate the truth of data. Tableau makes data accessible to everyone, and is a great way of sharing enterprise dashboards across the business. The deceptively simple Tableau interface hides a variety and complexity of features available for dashboarding, and this book will help you to become familiar with these features.

Tableau offers an easy-to-use and fun way of designing, constructing, and sharing your dashboards. This book will familiarize you with its features and enable you to develop and enhance your dashboard skills, starting with an overview of what dashboard is followed by how you can collect data using various mathematical formulas. Next you'll learn to filter and group data, as well as how to use various functions to present the data in an appealing and accurate way. The book will also teach you how to use the key advanced string functions to play with data and images. You will be walked through the various features of Tableau including dual axes, scatterplot matrices, heat maps, and sizing. Finally, this book will help you consider what to do next with your dashboard, whether it's on a server or in collaboration with other tools.

Style and approach

This book follows a step-by-step approach to taking a data source and building up a series of dashboard elements, ultimately resulting in a series of dashboards for your business. Each topic is explained sequentially in the process of creating a dashboard from design to delivery. There are also detailed explanations of the basic and advanced features of Tableau that serve the needs of dashboard artists.