Build 80% of your dashboards with these 4 charts, a bit of interactivity, and that's it.

You probably won't need to create anything fancy, formatting will be minimal, and you won't need to wrestle with containers.

This video show you how to create it in only 3 minutes!

Unlock the power of Tableau's Set Actions to enhance your data visualizations! 

In this in-depth tutorial, I'll walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to create an interactive chart that allows users to drill down from monthly to daily data by simply clicking on a month. 

Ideal for analysts, business intelligence professionals, and anyone who wants to level up their Tableau skills.

What You'll Learn:

- How to set up Set Actions in Tableau

- Create interactive charts for effective data exploration

- Best practices for visualizing monthly and daily data

Who This is For:

- Data Analysts

- Business Intelligence Professionals

- Tableau Beginners and Enthusiasts

Prerequisites:

- Basic understanding of Tableau Desktop

Resources:

- Download the sample workbook: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/andy.kriebel/viz/MonthtoDayDrillDown/Sheet1

- Data: https://data.world/vizwiz/sample-soda-sales

- Tableau official documentation on Set Actions: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/actions_sets.htm

Learn how to use Tableau and created impressive dashboards. 

Tableau is easy to use, but it can seem quite complex and confusing at first. The best way for you to learn Tableau is to download the files from the description of this video and follow along with me.  

By the end of the video, you will have a much better understanding of Tableau and be confident that you can build dashboards on your own. 

I'll take you step-by-step and show you how to create, publish and share your first interactive Tableau dashboard.

I'll cover:

1. Tableau's welcome screen
2. Connecting to data
3. Making visuals
4. Creating a dashboard
5. Adding interactivity
6. Publishing to Tableau Server
7. Sharing with others

By the end of the video, you'll have created your first interactive Tableau dashboard which you can publish to the web or to your company's Tableau Server. I'll also show you how you can share your Tableau dashboard with others.

⏬ DOWNLOAD the data, and starter and solution workbooks here.

I would appreciate your support with a small donation to continue to make videos for you.

Sign up for my newsletter to get advance, exclusive viewing of all of my videos, tips for using Tableau, and exclusive discounts on products I create.

https://andykriebel.com/

In this video we'll build a dynamic Tableau dashboard from scratch in just 10 minutes. We'll create a sales dashboard for Superstore’s European region. 

    1️⃣ We’ll create all of the charts which include a map, bar chart, line chart, and KPIs.

    2️⃣ We’ll customize the charts to fit our style.

    3️⃣ We’ll place the charts on the dashboard using layout containers, padding, formatting and more.

    4️⃣ We’ll add interactivity to the dashboard to make for a great user experience.

DOWNLOAD the data and starter and solution workbooks (this covers the costs of making this and future videos):

https://andykriebel.gumroad.com/l/10-minute-dashboard

I would appreciate your support, however, if you want the Excel file for free, download it here:

https://data.world/vizwiz/superstore-europe

Want early access to my upcoming videos like this one? Sign up for my newsletter. Every Friday morning, you'll get actionable tips to launch, grow, and unlock your career in data.

Sign up here. 

Having looked at the original visualization this week (here), it was pretty clear to me that the creators desired to create a KPI style dashboard. In a way it's good that I picked up on it that way. However, it wasn't designed particularly uclarly well to communicate most efficiently.

I decided during Watch Me Viz that I would stick with their idea of a KPI dashboard, but design it in a way that I thought would be easier to understand.

As per normal, it took way too long to faff about with the formatting. I made a couple of small changes after I finished the live stream. Click on the image below the video to check it out. Leave a comment on the video on YouTube if you have any questions. (Comments aren't appearing on the blog for some reason).

Have a wonderful week!

There are tons of ways to create a single level drill down, but if you’re having issues creating a second drill down, this video is a guaranteed way to help you fix this problem.

Additional video - Single Level Drill Down 

What could be improved?

Final Dashboard (click to interact)

As part of the training at The Data School, we're often tasked by clients to build industry specific dashboards and/or dashboards that can be used as templates for their organization. Of course what the client can ask for is often much more broad. From a dashboarding perspective, we tend to have the freedom to create what we think works best for their data. This them, in turn, helps create a sort of "brand" for their dashboards internally.

That got me thinking about common use cases for dashboards, dashboards that would likely span industries and companies and could serve as templates for others. In this series, I'll be posting templates that I have been building based on the data and sample dashboards from Excel Dashboard School. 

Let me make it clear that I am in no way criticizing the work they have created. My intent is to build an alternative method for displaying the data as a template in Tableau. The data and templates they have provided are the starting point for my work. I want to thank them for being so kind and sharing their work.

TOPIC

Customer Service Dashboard

RESOURCES

1. Dashboard Overview - https://exceldashboardschool.com/customer-service-dashboard/
2. Data and Interactive Dashboard - https://cdnspeed-exceldashboardsc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/080_CSD_final.zip

DASHBOARD TEMPLATE

My First Experience With Power BI

• It took me a few hours to create the viz you'll see below. Since I've never used PBI before, I felt that the amount of time spent wasn't too bad. It took me about 30 minutes to create my first Tableau dashboard back in 2008.
• Googling for solutions was very helpful; there seems to be plenty of documentation about how to use Power BI.
• Formatting is very tedious, but you have a ton of control.
• You can get pixel perfect reports by choosing NOT to snap to the grid. I used snap to grid to align everything quickly, then switched to the non-snap option to move things around a few pixels. I found this quite simple.
• I didn't have to pivot the data to get the view I wanted. Pivoting the data made creating the chart in Tableau easier.
• Creating calculations is pretty straightforward if you're used to Excel. The only confusing bit for me was that you have to create a new column, not a new measure. That didn't make sense, but once I knew what to do, it wasn't a problem.
• Adding dots to the ends of lines required a separate calculated field (or column in PBI terminology).
• The tooltips look great out of the box and are super responsive, although I didn't see any way to control what appears in the tooltip. For example, if you hover over the dot on the end of the line, you'll see the extra calcs I had to create for the dots. It would be nice to be able to hide those from the tooltip.
• Formatting fields is done through the Data pane. When you click on the spreadsheet icon you get a data preview, then you click the column header and format it.
• You can't create custom number formats, which meant I couldn't put a + before the positive percentages.
• Embedding and sharing to the web takes too many steps. From PBI Desktop you have to Publish to Power BI, then in the browser, you have to Publish to Web. Seems like an extra step to me.
• I couldn't control the line thickness of the reference line at zero, but it was great to be able to move the reference line to the back (you can't move a reference line to the back with Tableau).
• Creating the equivalent of a table calc is pretty simple. For example, I used the LOOKUP function to create the change versus 1965. Again, if you're familiar with Excel formulas that should be easy to pick up.
• I couldn't add a reference line on a continuous date axis.

1. Create a map
2. Create a barbell chart
3. Have the map interact with the barbell chart
4. Include an option for users to add custom annotations

With the Olympics starting this weekend, I thought we’d take a look at the most classic way that people display Olympic medal counts, as stacked bars. Being an American, I pretty much have only known NBC as the host of the Olympics, so when I went to their website and looked for historical medal counts, I was mortified. This viz is just about as bad as it can get.

What works well?

• The countries are ordered from most medals to least.
  
• There’s cute little actions when you click on the medals.
  
• They used appropriate colors for each medal type.
  

Seriously, that’s all I see that’s any good. This is an incredibly poorly done graphic.

What doesn’t work well?

• There’s no title.
  
• There aren’t any tooltips, so I have no idea how big each bar is; I’m forced to guess.
  
• I can only see seven countries at a time, and I can’t even see the name of the seventh country. I mean, who would ever want to compare only the 15th-21st ranked countries?
  
• When I click on the scroll button, it scrolls by an increment of 2. Why?
  
• Comparisons are nearly impossible with a stacked bar except for the total medal count and bronze.
  

Here are some of the changes I made:

• I separated out each medal into a dot plot and chose to show only the top 25.
  
• I included a summary next to each country to provide the exact medals counts.
• I included a mobile view, but in this view I remove this summary for a better visual look.
• I included informative tooltips.
  
• I included a title so you know what the chart is about.
  
• I included filters so the user can decide which Olympic games to include.
  
• The "sort by" option allows the user to pick the medal count to sort by making comparisons easier.
  

Today is my 9 year anniversary using Tableau. On April 11, 2007, I downloaded a trial of Tableau 3.0 and my life has never been the same. What better way to celebrate than working on Makeover Monday and creating my first mobile dashboard.

This week’s Makeover Monday was quite tough. How do you take a viz that’s already great and make it better? Or how do you tell the story differently? I wrote about this viz on my other site (DataVizDoneRight.com) a couple weeks ago. Here’s the viz again:

What works well?

• Title catches your attention
  
• Subtitle makes you more interested and sets up the story
• Very well organized
• Clear labeling of the headers
• Pictures of the faces make it feel more real
• Consistent use of colors makes it easy to understand and follow
• Nice totals on the right for context and they’re out of the way as to not distract
• Dark background works well and makes the bars pop out
• Great tooltips!
• Fantastic sorting interactivity
• Great spacing; there’s a lot of information yet it still feels simple

What could be be improved?

• Include a filter for gender
  
• Include more women
• Change the mark type for the ends

So given how good this is already and how little I saw that I could do to make it better, I thought I would use this week to practice making a mobile version, formatted for iPhone 6. I rarely create visualisations specifically for mobile and the only way to improve that ability is to practice.

Adding the filter for gender was easy. Including more women was out of scope.

Notice that I changed the ends of each bar to dots. I did this because I think the vertical bars are a bit tough to see; I wanted to make it easer for the viewer.

One challenge I had was that I wanted the sorting to be “touchable” like the gender filter is, but I couldn’t get it to work. I didn’t want to spend a ton of time fiddling with it, so I resorted to a parameter for the sorting.

I’d like to hear what you think about this mobile version. Does it work well? What could I do to make it better mobile experience?