Showing posts with label actionable. Show all posts
March 31, 2026
Fix These 5 Tableau Dashboard Mistakes Today
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These 5 Tableau dashboard mistakes can make your work look cluttered, confusing, and beginner-level fast. In this video, I break down the 5 biggest mistakes new Tableau users make and show you how to fix them so your dashboards look cleaner, more professional, and easier to use.
Download the practice workbook from this video here.
If you’re learning Tableau dashboard design, this video will help you avoid common problems like misusing colors, adding too many charts, ignoring your audience, overcomplicating layouts, and forgetting interactivity. These simple dashboard design tips will help you build cleaner, more actionable dashboards that feel less like data dumps and more like real business tools.
What we’ll cover:
- Misusing Colors, avoid the “Skittles Effect” and highlight what matters
- Chart Overload, use the Rule of 4 for cleaner dashboards
- Ignoring Your Audience, build for stakeholder decisions, not personal preference
- Container Chaos, why simple layouts beat overbuilt designs
- Functionality Fails, improve filter actions and remove distracting defaults
May 3, 2024
How to Make Your Cycle Plots Actionable in Tableau
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cycle plot
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table calc
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Cycle plots are a fantastic way to identify seasonality in a data set. And you can make them even more useful by adding indicators for whether they are above or below the average.
Here's how you can do that in Tableau in only 2 minutes.
Like this? You'll love Next-Level Tableau. Learn more at nextleveltableau.com.
July 15, 2017
A New Way to Visualize an Income Statement
Scroll down on the page and you see a series of examples. I clicked on the first one titled "Track profit and loss with an intuitive CFO dashboard". Yes! Had we found the Holy Grail? Turns out these are for the most part Excel dashboards rebuilt in Tableau, which is sadly how many finance departments choose to use Tableau. Take pity on them I say. Let's have a look at what Tableau created:
Keep in mind, this is billed as an "intuitive dashboard", but is it really? Normally when I write about makeovers, I list out the things that work well. With this dashboard, I can't think of a single thing that works well. Ok, maybe the title is clear and the filters are obvious. I don't see anything else that is even remotely intuitive otherwise.
Let's look at the viz in two separate pieces.
STACKED BAR/DUAL AXIS CHART
Generally I'm not a fan of dual axis charts that have different measures. I think these confuse the audience more than necessary, which defeats the purpose of using visuals to convey the information in the first place. In my experience, when people see a dual axis chart, they naturally look for correlations where they may not exist.
What else fails?
What else fails?
- The way this chart is designed, it's too much work to know which axis goes with which metric.
- Why use a dot plot when this is a time series? Wouldn't a line look better?
- Why are there separate summaries for the years? When you first look at the top section, your eyes go all the way across before you realize you're now looking at a yearly summary. Poor design.
- Why the heck is the Profit Margin legend so weirdly aligned?
- Net profit is stacked in front of net sales. I get that, but then I have to do that math in my head for the difference. Why not just express it as a profit ratio, making it much more intuitive?
- The dashboard is set to automatic size, which is never, ever a good choice.
FINANCE TABLES
Tables in Tableau annoy me probably more than anything else. Yes, I understand people like tables, especially finance people. However, we all know that all they want to do is copy/paste it into Excel. Just give it to them in Excel if that's what they want.What's wrong with this table?
- The table doesn't align with the bar charts.
- Again, they provided a separate yearly summary way off to the right. Why aren't the year totals after each year?
- I have to scroll to see all of the data in the table.
- There are way too many metrics. Breaking down COGS and OPEX into all of its parts is completely unnecessary.
- There are absolutely zero actions you can take from the table. It doesn't tell you anything about what's going well nor what needs attention.
I decided to spend some time making this over and creating an intuitive, actionable income statement. I drew inspiration from Lindsey Poulter's DC Metro scorecard to create my design. In my version I take each of the nine metrics that make up the income statement and create a "card" for each of them. Thank you to Tim Ngwena for the idea to add subtle borders around them.
Overall, the desktop and tablet versions are designed to be read in a Z-pattern, while the mobile version is designed for scrolling (see the video below).
How to read each card:
- YTD vs. PY Bullet Graph - The bar chart represents YTD for the given metric and the reference line represented the same period of the prior year (PY). The bar is then colored based on the variance to PY. Blue is good, orange is bad. For some of the metrics, being beyond PY is good, like Gross Sales. However, for other metrics like COGS, being above PY is bad. Hence why you see some bars orange that extend beyond PY.
- Variance to Budget Sparklines - Below each bar chart is a sparkline that goes back to January of PY. In this case, the sparklines represent 17 months. As new data comes in, the line grows. The sparklines show the variance to the budget for each metric. A reference line at zero represents being "on budget". The dot on the end of each line is color by the variance to the budget for the most recent month.
With that, I'd like to introduce you to a much more actionable, much more intuitive income statement. Below this image is a video of the mobile version. Click on the image for the interactive version. If you are reading this on a mobile device, you should see the mobile version automatically. Device Designer made this super simple!
I also would like to thank Adam Crahen, Pooja Gandhi, Curtis Harris, Michael Mixon, Eva Murray and the entire Information Lab team for their quick feedback on this yesterday. It's very much appreciated!!
VIDEO OF MOBILE VERSION
December 4, 2013
Tableau tip: Don’t waste the ends of your sparklines…make them actionable!
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Beautiful Evidence
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Edward Tufte
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Information Dashboard Design
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Jim Wahl
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Stephen Few
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I’ve been meaning to write about how I use sparklines for a while now and the post Two Tips for Meaningful Sparklines in Tableau by Jim Wahl finally gave me the push I needed to get this written.
Sparklines are one of my favorite chart types to include in dashboards, yet I see many people using them without providing enough context. Some people like to add bandlines, some like to add sets of dots, some like to add text, all in an effort to add meaning to sparklines. These are perfectly fine, but I think there’s a better way to make sparklines actionable. Is this the best way? Maybe not, but it is an alternative worth considering.
Sparklines were first introduced by Edward Tufte in his book Beautiful Evidence. Tufte says: “A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution.” Stephen Few expands Tufte’s definition in his book Information Dashboard Design: “Their whole purpose is to provide a quick sense of historical context to enrich the meaning of the measure. This is exactly what’s required in a dashboard.”
When someone is creating a dashboard, they should provide as much information and meaning as possible to make the information actionable. I don’t see any examples from Tufte, Few or Jim Wahl that provide much meaningful context to the end of a sparkline.
Tufte provides some examples:
He might add a red dot to the end of the line along with some text to highlight the latest value.
While it’s a bit tough to see in this next example, Tufte has used red dots for the beginning and ends of the lines and blue dots to indicate the highest and lowest values.
It’s important to also note how Tufte always includes the values associated with all of the highlighted dots.
There are tons and tons of examples of how Stephen Few uses sparklines. Consider this example from his whitepaper Dashboard Design for Real-Time Situation Awareness.
Few says: “Meaningful context has been added to these metrics in the form of sparklines, which provide a quick sense of the history that has led up to the present.” This small section of a dashboard is a classic Few design. You’ll often see him use (1) sparklines, (2) a visual indicator of health (the red dots in this case), and (3) bullet charts closely together.
When I use sparklines, I like to combine all of the elements of Tufte and Few designs. Let’s look at an example.
On the left you see the sparklines, but notice that I use the dot on the end of the line as an indicator to take action. Tufte uses the dot one the end to indicate you’re at the end. Does that make it actionable? Not necessarily. Few separates the indicator into its own space and does not mark the end of the sparkline. My version saves space, increases the data-to-ink ratio, and provides a visual indicator to the reader in one chart.
The table to the right summarizes the sparkline, pulling from Tufte’s practices. In this example, I’m concerned with comparingthe last two 7-day periods. Notice how I used conditional formatting so that the dot on the end of the line is the same color as the text in the WoW and WoW% columns. I don’t use bullet graphs because I feel that the text itself is sufficient; I don’t want to add a graph for the sake of having a graph for everything.
Simple, concise, actionable…all things you want in a dashboard. Keep reading to see how I built these sparklines in Tableau.
Step 1: The date calculations I use in the example below are simple and efficient when you include a Max Date field in your data source. Creating Max Date as a calculated field directly in Tableau won’t always work since you need the Max Date at the row level. In this example, I’ve switched the Superstore Sales data source to Custom SQL and added a subquery to include the Max Date at the row level.
TIP: If you have a large dataset, Tableau will run more efficient queries if you push the custom SQL into a view in your database. Tableau wraps its own SQL around the custom SQL, which can get quite messy and inefficient. Creating a view will simply the query Tableau runs and improve performance.
Step 2: I like my sparklines to show the last 30 days, so I need to include a date filter. I include my date filter as the first step so that my data set is smaller to work with from the outset.
A Boolean calculation works well here. Notice how it leverages the Max Date field. This wouldn’t work if the Max Date was a calculated field inside of Tableau.
To get my sparklines to look how I like them, the column and row shelves will need to look like this. Let’s break the worksheet down into its pieces.
Step 3: Create a dummy header and place it on the columns shelf. Place it on the Columns shelf and hide the fields labels for the columns.
Step 4: Right-click-drag Order Date to the columns shelf and choose the first option, Order Date (Continuous). Notice how it only shows the last 30 days.
Step 5: Right-click on the Order Date pill and uncheck Show Header. This hides the date axis.
Step 6: Drag Category on the Rows shelf and hide the headers. The headers aren’t needed since they’re on the left side of the table; there’s no need to repeat them.
Step 7: Place Sales on the Rows shelf to the right of Category. This gives us the lines. Make them thinner, change the color to dark gray, and resize the chart to make them look like sparklines.
Step 8: Double-click on the Sales axis to bring up the axis options. Uncheck Include Zero and choose Independent axis ranges for each row or column. This gives us the view that best fits the space. Few talks about the scaling options for sparklines in Chapter 10 of Information Dashboard Design.
Step 9: We need a calculated field to show a dot on the end of the line. You might be tempted to simply turn on the line ends, but that won’t do the trick because you can’t color the line ends only. The calculated field should only capture sales for the last day. This is where our Max Date field comes in handy again.
Step 10: Drag the new Last Day Sales field onto the Rows shelf to the right of the Sales pill. Right-click on the Last Day Sales pill and choose Dual Axis. Right-click on the scale for Last Day Sales and choose Synchronize Axis. Right-click on Sales pill and uncheck Show Header.
We’re almost done. All we need to do now is color the dot.
Step 11: I like my dots to be colored by the week over week change. This requires me to create several calculated fields. You could combine all of these calculated fields into a single calculation, but I like separating the parts of the calculation to make it easier to understand and so that each calculation is reusable.
Create all of these calculated fields in this order (special thanks to Joe Mako for helping me get these calculations working and showing me why they’re more efficient than what I had been doing):
- Last 7 Day Sales:
IF [Order Date] >= DATEADD('day', -6, [Max Date]) THEN [Sales]
END - Prior 7 Day Sales:
IF [Order Date] >= DATEADD('day', -13, [Max Date]) AND [Order Date] <= DATEADD('day', -7, [Max Date]) THEN [Sales]
END - Total Sales - Last 7 Days:
IIF(LAST()=0, RUNNING_SUM(SUM([Last 7 Day Sales])), null) - Total Sales - Prior 7 Days:
IIF(LAST()=0, RUNNING_SUM(SUM([Prior 7 Day Sales])), null) - WoW (week over week):
[Total Sales - Last 7 Days] - [Total Sales - Prior 7 Days] - WoW %:
[WoW]/[Total Sales - Prior 7 Days]
Step 13: Right-click on the WoW % pill, go down to Compute Using and choose Order Date.
Step 14: Double-click on the color legend and change the settings to something like these:
You might need to do a bit more formatting to get your viz just the way you want it, but in the end, you’ll want it to look something to this:
Notice that I keep the row banding. I like to include banding on both the sparkline chart and the table so that the reader’s eyes go across the dashboard.
This might seem like a lot of steps, but once you do it a couple of times, it’s pretty quick; you’ll be able to do this in only a couple of minutes.
Building the table is super simple now that you have all of the calculations (this is why I create all of them individually). Download the workbook here to see how all of this was built.
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