How to Create a Story in Tableau

Building a dashboard in Tableau is one thing, but guiding your audience through a compelling, data-driven narrative is another. That’s where Tableau Stories come in, allowing you to sequence your visualizations and insights into a clear, persuasive a-ha moment for your audience. This article will walk you through exactly how to create a Story in Tableau, from the basic setup to tips for making your narrative stick.

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What Exactly is a Tableau Story?

Think of a Tableau Story as a guided presentation built from your data visualizations. It’s a sequence of individual worksheets or entire dashboards, called story points, that you arrange in a specific order to walk your audience through a business case, a series of findings, or the context behind a trend.

Most people new to Tableau often wonder about the difference between a dashboard and a story. It’s simple:

• A Dashboard provides a high-level, at-a-glance view of multiple data points on a single screen. It's like a control panel for your business, great for monitoring performance and answering a variety of questions. Users can explore it freely.
• A Story presents a guided, linear path through the data. You control the narrative, showing your audience what to look at and in what order. It's less about open-ended exploration and more about making a specific point or explaining a discovery. It’s the difference between giving someone a map (a dashboard) and giving them a guided tour (a story).

If you're trying to persuade stakeholders to take action, explain the "why" behind an unexpected dip in sales, or present the results of a marketing campaign, a Story is often a far more effective tool than a standalone dashboard.

Before You Build: Planning Your Narrative

The success of your story depends more on your plan than your Tableau proficiency. Before you even open the Story tab, you need a clear idea of the narrative you want to build. Stories are built from your existing worksheets and dashboards, so you need to create those building blocks first.

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Storyboarding Your Insights

The best practice is to roughly storyboard your analysis before even creating all of the worksheets. This preparation is invaluable in guiding your story's development. Here is how we recommend creating a path for your audience.

Ask Yourself These 4 Questions to Storyboard a Masterpiece Analysis

When you sit down to plan your story, ask yourself these four questions:

1. What's the main idea behind each storyboard point?
2. Give each point a catchy newspaper headline to describe your analysis point. Remember, you need to tell 'em and sell 'em.
3. For the third point, ask "So what does all this mean?" Then follow with the question, "Why should I care?"
4. At the very end of your storyboard, finish your "a-ha moment" for your audience: Answer "So, what now?" Your audience wants to understand what kind of action they need to take. Guide them to where your company needs to go.

Imagine you're an e-commerce analyst trying to explain a recent increase in revenue. Your storyboard might look something like this:

• Story Point 1: Headline - Q3 Revenue Spikes! Show a line chart of weekly revenue for the last two quarters. The key visual is a clear upward trend in the most recent quarter (Q3). Takeaway: Revenue is up significantly.
• Story Point 2: Headline - Where Did the Growth Come From? Show a map visualizing sales by state. Highlight the top 3 states driving the increase. Takeaway: The growth is concentrated in California, Texas, and Florida.
• So What? - This shows Q3-focused campaigns are working. And you should keep investing in it because, well, they work.
• Last but not least? Headline: Paid Search a Home Run in CA - Let’s Scale in TX & FL." Finish your story right there. You're done. Now it's time to build!

This simple planning process ensures your story has a logical flow and that each visualization serves your narrative. Now that you have your plan, it is time to build.

How to Create a Story in Tableau: A Step-by-Step Guide

With your worksheets and dashboards prepared and your narrative planned, you’re ready to build the story itself. The process is straightforward and intuitive.

Step 1: Open a New Story

Look at the bottom of your Tableau workbook window. Next to the "New Worksheet" and "New Dashboard" icons, you'll see an icon of a book. Click it to create a new, blank story canvas.

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Step 2: Add Your First Story Point

On the left-hand side, you’ll see the "Story" pane, which lists all the available worksheets and dashboards in your workbook. To add a story point, simply drag a worksheet or dashboard from this pane and drop it onto the canvas area that says "Drag a sheet here."

This worksheet is now your first story point. You’ll notice a navigator has appeared at the top of the canvas, which will track your points as you add them.

Step 3: Write a Caption and Headline

Above your story point, there’s a space to add a description or title. This text is critical because it acts as the voiceover for your narrative. Use it to explain what the audience should see in the visualization below.

Instead of a generic title like "Sales Over Time," use a headline that communicates your insight, similar to our plan: "Q3 Revenue Spikes After New Campaign Launch." Clear, concise captions guide your audience and remove ambiguity.

Step 4: Create More Story Points

Now it’s time to add the next step in your narrative. In the Story pane, you have a few options for creating new story points:

• Blank: Drag this onto the canvas to create a new, empty story point. You can then drag a different worksheet or dashboard into it. This is the most common method for progressing your story with a new visualization.
• Duplicate: This option copies your current story point, including its underlying worksheet and any filters. This is incredibly useful when you want to show a slight variation of the same chart. For instance, you could duplicate a sales chart, then apply a filter on the new story point to isolate a specific region to show your audience where growth came from.

Repeat this process for each 'act' of your story, following the storyboard you created. Drag in your new sheets (or duplicate existing ones) and write clear, explanatory headlines for each point.

Step 5: Customize the Layout and Navigator

Tableau offers a few ways to customize a story’s appearance to best fit your presentation style. Within the Story pane on the left, you'll find these options:

• Size: You can set a fixed size for your story (e.g., a specific PowerPoint slide dimension like 1600x900) or choose "Automatic" to let it fill the viewer's screen. If you have any dashboards, it's generally better to use a fixed size to avoid elements moving around unexpectedly.
• Show Title: Toggle the main story title on or off.
• Navigator Style: Below the title, you can choose how your audience navigates between story points: Caption Boxes, Numbers, or simple Dots. "Caption Boxes" is often the most effective style as it shows the headline for each point, giving your audience a clear preview of the narrative structure.

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Step 6: Present and Share Your Completed Story

Once you’ve built all your story points, it’s time to present them. In the top right corner of the Tableau window, find the "Presentation Mode" icon (it looks like a small screen or projector). Clicking this will take your story full-screen, hiding all the authoring menus.

You can now click through the navigator points just as you would move through slides in a PowerPoint deck. The best part? Everything is still fully interactive. Your audience can hover over marks to see tooltips or click on filters, a feature that makes Tableau Stories far more dynamic than static presentation slides.

To share your work, publish the workbook to Tableau Public or Tableau Server. Viewers can then interact with your story directly in their web browsers.

Tips for Making Your Tableau Story Great

Creating the story is just the technical part. Creating a good story requires a bit more thought.

• One Point, One Idea: Don’t try to communicate too much at once. Each story point should have a single, primary idea. If you have a busy dashboard, consider breaking its key insights into multiple story points to explain them individually.
• Keep Your Audience Top of Mind: Tailor the narrative to your audience. A technical crowd might appreciate granular detail, but executives typically need a high-level summary. Before telling a story with data, identify which story would be the most relevant and useful for you and them.
• Use Descriptive Language: The headlines and captions are your narrative guide. Annotate your charts with direct callouts (e.g., "Uptick begins here") to connect your text directly to the data.
• Mind Your Filters: Remember that any filters or modifications you make on a worksheet or dashboard will carry through to a duplicated story point. Double-check that you're showing exactly what you intend to show.

Final Thoughts

Tableau's story features are some of the easiest and yet underused features built into the platform. We encourage you to try our 5-step guide and discover the benefits of building data presentations in Tableau.

Sometimes the greatest challenge we face when building a data narrative is the amount of time we spend organizing our data source. With Graphed, we help solve our customers' biggest bottlenecks, not by building a Tableau story, but by streamlining the entire process from start to finish. Ask any question, and get an entire dashboard ready to present live just for you and your team.