Lecture 18: Dashboards in Tableau
Nick Huntington-Klein
23 June, 2022
Dashboards in Tableau
- Tableau is designed for dashboards, and they make it easy
- Most of what we’ll cover today you could probably figure out
yourself by clicking “New Dashboard” at the bottom and clicking
around
- So we’ll keep this brief and then get to trying stuff out
Creating a Dashboard
- Create your visualizations and tables
- Then down at the bottom, next to the Sheets, there’s a + icon for
“New Dashboard”
- Click it!
Adding Worksheets to the Dashboard
- From here you’ll see:
- The Layout option (in a sec)
- Your worksheets - drag them in!
- Options at the bottom to add navigation, images, text, web
pages
Adding Worksheets to the Dashboard

Layout
- Tableau Dashboards can be laid out for desktop, mobile, or
tablet
- Check your Size options, and try Device Preview with a few things
on
- Also check the Layout tab for other options
- Keep the audience in mind, and whether some visualizations might not
translate to tiny sizes!
Layout
- You can “float” elements of the dashboard but this isn’t generally a
good idea
- What is a good idea is moving things like legends (if you
have them) close to where the actual viz that uses them is
- You don’t want the legend for Viz B sitting next to Viz A -
confusing!
Filters
- You can add interactive filters to look at different parts of the
data, and apply those filters broadly
- Select a viz that uses the variable you want to filter on and hit
the “use as filter” button (looks like a funnel) and then the down arrow
and Filter to select the variable to filter on
- A filter will appear. On the down arrow for THAT, you can change the
kind of filter you get (dropdown, etc.) and also which worksheets the
filter applies to - can update the whole dashboard at once with one
filter if you like!
Considerations for Dashboards
If you’re planning to end up with a dashboard…
- Hold off on annotations until the end; what looks good on a single
image might get cramped on multiples
- Consider how you might reduce the number of legends required to
understand things. Lots of legends can get confusing
- Try to make dashboard and worksheet formatting consistent
- Use a grid layout! Don’t get wild
- Consider including the “Export to PDF” option