How to Create a Company Dashboard in Tableau

Creating a company dashboard in Tableau puts all your most important metrics in one place, letting you see performance at a glance and find new insights without digging through spreadsheets. This guide will walk you through the essential steps to build your first professional, interactive dashboard from scratch, using a simple sales dataset as an example.

Start with a Plan: What Story Will Your Dashboard Tell?

Before you even open Tableau, take a moment to think about the purpose of your dashboard. A great dashboard isn’t just a random collection of charts, it’s a tool designed to answer specific business questions. Who is this for, and what do they need to know?

For this tutorial, let’s imagine we're building a dashboard for a sales manager. They need a high-level view of company performance. The key questions they want to answer are:

• What is our total revenue and how many units have we sold?

• How is our revenue trending over time?

• Which geographic regions are performing the best?

• Who are our top-performing sales reps?

Defining these questions upfront will guide every decision you make, from choosing chart types to arranging the final layout.

Preparing Your Data: The Foundation of Every Great Dashboard

Tableau is powerful, but it needs clean, structured data to work its magic. Messy data with misspellings, empty cells, and inconsistent formats will lead to confusing and inaccurate visualizations. For our example, we'll use a simple spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheets) with the following columns:

• Order Date: The date the sale was made.

• Region: The sales region (e.g., North, South, East, West).

• Sales Rep: The name of the salesperson.

• Product Category: The category of the item sold (e.g., Electronics, Furniture).

• Units Sold: The number of items sold in the transaction.

• Revenue: The total revenue from the transaction.

Quick Data Cleaning Checklist:

• Consistency is Key: Ensure values are consistent. "North" and "north" will be treated as two different regions unless you standardize them.

• Correct Data Types: Make sure dates are formatted as dates, and numbers are formatted as numbers (not text).

• Fill Blank Cells: Decide how to handle empty cells. Is it a zero, or should the row be removed?

Spending five minutes cleaning your data now can save you hours of frustration later. A well-organized source file is your best friend.

Connecting Your Data to Tableau

With your clean dataset ready, it's time to bring it into Tableau. The process is straightforward.

1. Open Tableau Desktop. In the "Connect" pane on the left, choose an appropriate connector. If your file is an Excel spreadsheet, select "Microsoft Excel". If it's in Google Drive, select "Google Drive" and follow the prompts.

2. Locate and open your file. Tableau will navigate to the "Data Source" screen.

3. Here, you can see your data. Drag the sheet containing your sales data from the left pane into the canvas area at the top.

4. Tableau will display a preview of your data. You can confirm that all your columns and data types came through correctly.

Understanding Dimensions vs. Measures

In the bottom-left pane of the worksheet view, you'll see Tableau automatically sorted your columns into two categories: Dimensions (blue pills) and Measures (green pills). Understanding this distinction is fundamental to using Tableau.

• Dimensions are qualitative or categorical data. Think of them as the "who, what, and where" in your data. Examples from our dataset are Region, Sales Rep, and Product Category. You use them to slice and dice your data.

• Measures are quantitative, numerical data. They are the numbers you want to aggregate - sum, average, count, etc. In our case, Units Sold and Revenue are measures.

Getting this right makes building charts intuitive and fast. If Tableau miscategorized a field (e.g., puts a numeric ID in Measures), simply drag and drop it into the correct category.

Building Your Visualizations (The "Worksheets")

In Tableau lingo, individual charts and graphs are built on "Worksheets" (often called "sheets" or "views"). We'll create a separate sheet for each question our sales manager wants to be answered before combining them into a final dashboard.

Click the "New Worksheet" tab at the bottom of the screen to get started.

1. KPI Cards: Total Revenue and Units Sold

High-level metrics are often best displayed as large, clear numbers.

1. Name your new sheet "Total Revenue."

2. From the "Measures" pane, drag Revenue onto the Text square in the Marks card.

3. You'll see a single number appear. To make it stand out, click on the Text square, then the small three-dot button that appears. Increase the font size and make it bold. You can also edit the text to prepend a label like "Total Revenue:".

4. Repeat this process on a new worksheet for "Total Units Sold."

2. Time-Series Chart: Revenue by Month

Now, let's look at performance over time.

1. Create a new worksheet and name it "Monthly Revenue."

2. Drag Order Date from "Dimensions" and drop it onto the Columns shelf. Tableau will likely default this to YEAR(Order Date).

3. Drag Revenue from "Measures" and drop it onto the Rows shelf. You'll get a simple line chart.

4. To see more detail, right-click the YEAR(Order Date) pill in the Columns shelf and select "Month" (the option with a sample month and year, like "May 2015"). This will show a continuous line chart of revenue for each month in your dataset.

3. Geographic Map: Revenue by Region

Tableau's mapping feature is one of its strongest selling points.

1. Create a new worksheet and name it "Revenue by Region Map."

2. Find the Region dimension. Because it contains geographic data, Tableau should have a small globe icon next to it.

3. Double-click on Region. Tableau will automatically generate a map with a dot in each region from your data.

4. To make it more meaningful, drag Revenue from "Measures" onto the Color square on the Marks card. Tableau will color-code the regions, with darker shades representing higher revenue. You can also drag Revenue onto the Label square to display the exact amount for each region.

4. Bar Chart: Top Sales Reps

Finally, let's see who is driving the most sales.

1. Create a new worksheet named "Top Sales Reps."

2. Drag the Sales Rep dimension to the Rows shelf.

3. Drag the Revenue measure to the Columns shelf. Voila! You have a horizontal bar chart showing a bar for each rep.

4. Make it even more useful by sorting it. Click the sort icon in the toolbar (it looks like a small bar chart with an up/down arrow) to arrange the reps from highest to lowest revenue.

Assembling Your Company Dashboard

Now that we have all our building blocks (our individual worksheets), it's time to put them together on a dashboard.

1. Click the "New Dashboard" button at the bottom of the screen (it's the icon showing a grid of four squares).

2. You’ll see a blank canvas. On the left, under "Sheets," you'll see all the worksheets you just created.

3. Simply drag and drop your sheets onto the canvas. Start with your KPI cards ("Total Revenue" and "Total Units Sold"), placing them in containers - Tableau helps you with this by showing gray boxes where the worksheet will go. Try to place them side-by-side at the top.

4. Next, drag your "Monthly Revenue" chart below the KPI cards.

5. Drag the "Revenue by Region Map" and "Top Sales Reps" sheets to fill the remaining space. You can resize them by hovering over the borders between charts until you see a double-ended arrow and then clicking and dragging.

Making Your Dashboard Interactive

A static dashboard is good, but an interactive dashboard is so much better. The killer feature here is the ability to use one chart as a filter for the others.

1. Select your "Revenue by Region Map" on the dashboard.

2. Look for the small icons that appear in its top corner and click the Use as Filter icon (it looks like a funnel).

3. That's it! Now, click on a region in your map (e.g., "West") and watch as the monthly revenue trend line, top sales reps, and even the KPI cards all update instantly to show data for only the "West" region. Click it again to deselect and view the total data.

This single click transforms your dashboard from a simple report into a powerful analytical tool, allowing managers to explore the data themselves to answer follow-up questions in seconds.

Final Thoughts

By defining your goals, preparing your data, and building visualizations piece by piece, you've successfully created a company dashboard in Tableau. You combined various chart types - KPIs, a line chart, a map, and a bar chart - into a single, interactive view that empowers decision-makers to see the big picture and explore the details easily.

While mastering tools like Tableau unlock incredible analytical capabilities, it does come with a significant learning curve just to build your first report. This is exactly why we built Graphed. We wanted to skip that entire lengthy process. Instead of manually building charts and wrestling with dashboard layouts, you can connect data sources like Shopify or Google Analytics and just ask in plain language, "Show me a dashboard of monthly revenue, top converting campaigns, and revenue by region for the last 90 days." Our AI handles all the technical lifting, creating live, interactive dashboards for you in seconds, so you get to focus on what to do with the insights - not how to find them.