How to Create a View in Tableau

Creating your first chart in Tableau can feel as intimidating as it is exciting. You’ve connected your data, and now you’re staring at a blank canvas packed with buttons, shelves, and panes. This article cuts through the noise and walks you through exactly how to create a "view" - Tableau’s term for any single visualization - from scratch. We’ll cover the basic workspace, the step-by-step process of building a chart, and a few tips to make your visualizations clear and insightful.

What is a View in Tableau?

In the Tableau universe, a view is simply a visualization you create on a single worksheet. It can be a bar chart, a line graph, a map, a scatter plot, or any other visual representation of your data. Think of it as a single building block. You create individual views to answer specific questions, and then you can combine multiple views together on a dashboard to tell a bigger story. For now, let’s focus on mastering that one essential block: the view.

Understanding the Tableau Workspace

Before you can start building, you need to know your way around the workshop. When you open a Tableau worksheet, the interface might look complex, but you only need to focus on a few key areas to get started.

Here’s a quick tour of the main components:

1. Data Pane: Located on the far left, this is where all the columns from your connected data source live. Tableau automatically sorts them into two main categories:

• Dimensions (Blue): These are your categorical or descriptive fields. Think of things like Product Category, Customer Name, Region, or Order Date. Dimensions are what you use to "slice" your data. They create the labels on your charts.
• Measures (Green): These are your numerical, quantifiable fields that you can perform calculations on. Examples include Sales, Profit, Quantity, and Discount. Measures are what create the numbers on your charts (the length of a bar, the point on a line, etc.).

Remembering “blue for descriptive, green for math” is a huge help when you're starting out.

2. Shelves and Cards: These are the empty containers at the top and left of the main canvas where you’ll drag your dimensions and measures. They are the heart of building a view.

• Columns Shelf: Fields placed here create the columns of your data table or the X-axis of your chart.
• Rows Shelf: Fields placed here create the rows of your data table or the Y-axis of your chart.
• Marks Card: This powerful little box controls all the visual elements of your chart. It contains shelves for Color, Size, Label, Detail, and Tooltip. This is where you bring your view to life by adding color gradients, changing the size of circles, or displaying values on your chart. There's also a dropdown menu here to change your chart type (e.g., from Automatic to Bar, Line, or Square).
• Filters Shelf: If you only want to focus on a specific subset of your data (e.g., sales from last year only), you can drag a field to the Filters shelf and set criteria.

3. The Canvas (The View): This is the large, blank white space in the middle of your screen. As you drag and drop fields from the Data Pane onto the shelves, your visualization will appear here instantly.

Step-by-Step: Creating Your First View in Tableau

Let's walk through building a simple but insightful bar chart. For this example, we’ll use the "Sample - Superstore" dataset that comes packaged with Tableau, and our goal is to answer a common business question: "Which product sub-categories are our top performers by sales?"

Step 1: Get Your "What" and "How" Ready

Before you drag anything, take a second to frame your question. We want to see Sales (our measure) for each Product Sub-Category (our dimension).

This means we'll need:

• Sub-Category from our Dimensions.
• Sales from our Measures.

Step 2: Drag Your Dimension to Columns

First, find the Sub-Category dimension in the Data Pane on the left. Click and drag this "blue pill" onto the Columns Shelf at the top of the canvas.

You’ll immediately see column headers appear on your canvas for each sub-category, like "Accessories," "Appliances," "Art," and so on. Right now, it's just a row of labels labeled "Abc" - because we haven't told Tableau what to measure yet.

Step 3: Drag Your Measure to Rows

Next, find the Sales measure in the Data Pane. Click and drag this "green pill" onto the Rows Shelf.

Instantly, Tableau springs into action. It automatically knows you want to see the Sub-Category for each label and that Sales should be aggregated (in this case, as a SUM). A vertical bar chart appears on your canvas! Each bar corresponds to a sub-category, and its height represents the total sales for that category.

Step 4: Sort for Clarity

This is an easy win for readability. The sub-categories are currently arranged alphabetically, making it hard to see a performance ranking at a glance. To fix this, simply hover over the "Sales" axis label until a small sort icon appears, or use the one-click sort buttons in the toolbar at the top. Sorting descending (highest to lowest) instantly rearranges the bars, clearly showing that "Phones" and "Chairs" are the top performers.

Step 5: Refine Your View With Color and Tooltips

Your chart is functional, but let's add another layer of information. What if we want to know which of these sub-categories are actually profitable?

Add color for context: Find the Profit measure in the Data Pane and drag it directly onto the Color tile in the Marks Card. Tableau automatically applies a color gradient (usually blue for positive and orange for negative). Now, you can instantly see that while "Tables" has high sales, it's actually losing money - a crucial insight that was hidden before!

Enhance your tooltip: A tooltip is the little box of information that appears when you hover over a mark (a bar, in this case). By default, it shows the fields you're already using. You can add more context by dragging other fields to the Tooltip tile on the Marks Card. For example, drag Profit Ratio to the Tooltip to see that information on hover without cluttering the main chart.

Practical Tips for Better Tableau Views

As you move beyond your first view, keep these simple tips in mind to stay on the right track.

• Always Start with a Question: Building a view is much easier when you know what you're trying to figure out. Before touching your mouse, state your goal clearly: "I want to compare sales across different regions," or "I want to see how web traffic trends over the last quarter." This clarity will guide your choices.
• Use "Show Me" for Inspiration: If you're not sure which chart type is best, use Tableau’s "Show Me" feature. Hold Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac), select the dimensions and measures you're interested in from the Data Pane, and then open the "Show Me" panel in the top-right corner. Tableau will highlight the recommended charts for the data you've selected. It's a fantastic learning tool.
• Keep it Simple: The goal is to communicate information, not cram every possible data point into one chart. Sometimes a simple, well-labeled bar chart is far more effective than a complicated chart that nobody can understand.
• Filter and Focus: Use the Filters Shelf to narrow the scope of your view. Looking at ten years of data when you only care about last quarter can be messy. Drag Order Date to Filters and select a relative date range (like "Previous Year") to keep your view focused and relevant.

From a Single View to a Dashboard

Once you’ve mastered creating individual views, the next step is combining them into a dashboard. A dashboard allows you to display several worksheets on a single screen, providing a comprehensive overview of your data. You can arrange your "Sales by Sub-Category" view next to a map showing "Sales by State" and a line chart of "Sales Over Time".

The real power of dashboards is interactivity. You can set them up so that when you click on a state in your map view, all the other views on the dashboard automatically filter to show data for only that state. This is how you move from static charts to a dynamic, explorable analytical tool.

Final Thoughts

This article covered the fundamentals of how to create a view in Tableau, guiding you from a blank slate to an insightful, color-coded bar chart. By understanding the workspace, starting with a clear question, and using the shelves and cards correctly, you can start turning mountains of raw data into clear, actionable insights.

While Tableau is a fantastic enterprise tool, its power comes with a significant learning curve. Manually building views requires knowing precisely what to drag and where. We built Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require weeks of training. Instead of juggling shelves and cards, you simply ask for what you want in plain English, like “show me sales by category as a bar chart.” We connect directly to your live data sources and analyze, building the visualization you asked for in seconds. It allows your entire team to finally go from asking questions to getting answers without any friction at all.