How to Make a Dashboard in Tableau

Building a Tableau dashboard is one of the best ways to turn raw spreadsheet data into a clear story that anyone can understand. Instead of drowning in rows and columns, you can create interactive, visual reports that highlight trends and insights instantly. This guide will walk you through creating your first Tableau dashboard, from connecting your data to adding final interactive elements.

What is a Tableau Dashboard and Why Build One?

In simple terms, a Tableau dashboard is a collection of several worksheets and related information presented in a single, unified view. Think of it as a control panel for your data. You can bring multiple charts, graphs, maps, and KPIs together to tell a cohesive story.

The main reason to build one is clarity. A well-designed dashboard allows you (and your team) to:

• Monitor performance at a glance: Track key metrics in near real-time without digging through reports.
• See relationships in your data: Visualize how different parts of your business affect one another, like how marketing spend impacts sales by region.
• Empower others to explore: Interactive elements like filters let users drill down into specific data points on their own, answering their own questions without needing an analyst.
• Communicate insights effectively: A visual dashboard is far more compelling in a presentation than a spreadsheet filled with numbers.

Before You Build: Planning for Success

Jumping straight into building charts without a plan is a common mistake. A few minutes of planning will save you hours of revisions later. Before you even open Tableau, ask yourself these three critical questions.

1. Who is the Audience?

Are you building this for a C-level executive, a marketing manager, or a sales team? The answer dramatically changes what you should display.

• An executive likely wants a high-level overview with key performance indicators (KPIs) like total revenue, profit margin, and year-over-year growth.
• A marketing manager needs to see campaign performance, cost per lead, and channel ROI.
• A sales rep might want to track their pipeline, recent deals closed, and progress toward their quota.

Tailor the complexity and the metrics to what the end-user actually needs to know to do their job better.

2. What is the Core Purpose?

What question is this dashboard supposed to answer? Try to summarize its purpose in a single sentence. For example:

• “To monitor monthly sales performance against targets by region and product category.”
• “To understand website traffic sources and their conversion rates over the last quarter.”
• “To analyze our customer support ticket volume and resolution times by agent.”

This "purpose statement" acts as your guide, preventing you from adding irrelevant charts that clutter the view and distract from the main story.

3. How Should It Be Structured?

Grab a pen and paper (or a whiteboard) and sketch a rough layout. Where will the most important information go? A common layout follows how people read (left-to-right, top-to-bottom):

• Top-Left: Place your most important KPIs or summary charts here. This is the first place a viewer's eye will land.
• Main Body: Use this area for the primary charts that support your dashboard's purpose, like trend lines or detailed bar charts.
• Bottom/Right: This is a good spot for more granular details or supplemental information.

This simple sketch provides a blueprint, making the actual building process in Tableau much faster and more organized.

Step-by-Step: Creating a Dashboard in Tableau

Once you have a plan, it's time to build. We'll walk through creating a simple sales performance dashboard using the "Sample - Superstore" dataset that comes with Tableau.

Step 1: Connect to Your Data

First, you need to tell Tableau where your data lives.

1. Open Tableau Desktop.
2. Under the Connect pane on the left, you’ll see various options. If you're using a spreadsheet, click Microsoft Excel. If you are using Tableau's built-in sample data, click on Sample - Superstore.
3. Navigate to your file and click Open.
4. Tableau's Data Source page will appear. Here you can see your tables, drag the Orders table into the canvas, and review your columns. Tableau automatically categorizes your data into Dimensions (qualitative data like names or categories) and Measures (quantitative data like numbers you can calculate).

Once you're happy with the data source, click on the orange “Sheet 1” tab at the bottom left to go to your first worksheet.

Step 2: Create a Few Worksheets (Your Charts)

A dashboard is made of individual worksheets. Let's create three charts that will give us a good overview of sales performance.

Worksheet 1: Sales by Category (Bar Chart)

1. Rename "Sheet 1" to "Sales by Category".
2. From the Data pane on the left, drag the Category dimension to the Columns shelf.
3. Drag the Sales measure to the Rows shelf.
4. Voila! Tableau instantly creates a vertical bar chart. To make it more reader-friendly, drag the Sales measure onto the Label mark on the Marks card to show the sales figures on each bar. You can also drag Category to the Color mark to color-code the bars.

Worksheet 2: Sales Over Time (Line Chart)

1. Click the "New Worksheet" icon at the bottom of the screen. Rename it to "Sales Over Time".
2. Drag Order Date to the Columns shelf. Tableau might default to YEAR(Order Date). You can click the + sign on the 'YEAR(Order Date)' pill once to drill down to Quarter.
3. Drag Sales to the Rows shelf.
4. You now have a line chart showing how sales have trended over time.

Worksheet 3: Sales by State (Map)

1. Create another new worksheet and name it “Sales by State”.
2. Find the State dimension (it should have a small globe icon next to it, indicating it's a geographic field). Double-click it.
3. Tableau automatically generates a map with a dot for each state in your data.
4. Now, drag the Sales measure onto the Color mark. The states will now be color-graded based on their sales volume - the darker the state, the higher the sales. You can also drag Sales onto the Size mark to make states with more sales have a larger circle.

With these three worksheets created, we have all the building blocks for our dashboard.

Step 3: Assemble Your Dashboard

Now for the fun part: putting it all together!

1. Click the New Dashboard icon at the bottom of the window (it's the one that looks like a grid).
2. On the left side, you'll see your three worksheets listed under Sheets.
3. The dashboard is a blank canvas. Let's set its size first. In the Dashboard pane under Size, the default is Fixed size. You can leave it for now or change it later to 'Automatic' so it adjusts to the viewer's screen.
4. Simply drag and drop your worksheets from the Sheets list onto the "Drop sheets here" canvas. Start by dragging "Sales Over Time" to the top half of the canvas.
5. Next, drag "Sales by Category" to the bottom-left quarter of the canvas.
6. Finally, drag "Sales by State" to the remaining space on the bottom-right.

Tableau will automatically arrange them. You can adjust the borders between them to resize each component. Now, all your charts are in a single view!

Step 4: Make It Interactive with Filters

A static dashboard is good, but an interactive one is great. Let's add a filter that allows users to view data for a specific year.

1. Select the "Sales Over Time" worksheet within your dashboard. Click the small downward arrow that appears at the top right of its container and select Filters > YEAR(Order Date).
2. A filter control for the year will appear on the right side of your dashboard. Try unchecking a year - only the "Sales Over Time" chart changes. Not very useful.
3. To make this filter control all the worksheets, click the downward arrow on the year filter itself and select Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source.
4. Now, when you select a year, all three charts on your dashboard will update simultaneously. This is the power of interactivity!

Bonus Tip: Use a Sheet as a Filter

You can also make a chart act as a filter for the others on the dashboard using an 'Action'.

1. Select the "Sales by State" map on your dashboard.
2. Click the small Use as Filter icon (it looks like a funnel) that appears in the top-right border of the map's container.
3. Now, click on a state on the map. Notice how the line chart and bar chart dynamically update to show data for only that selected state. Click it again to deselect and return to the national view.

Final Thoughts

Building a powerful dashboard in Tableau follows a straightforward process: understand your audience and goal, create individual worksheets for each visualization, assemble them on a dashboard canvas, and then add interactive elements like filters to empower users. The skills you've learned here - creating bars, lines, and maps, and then combining them - are the foundation for nearly all the complex dashboards you'll encounter.

While Tableau is a fantastic tool, we know its learning curve can be steep for marketing and sales teams who just need quick answers. Instead of spending hours clicking, dragging, and formatting, Graphed lets your team create dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. We designed it so you can connect your data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce - and instantly build real-time reports by simply typing "show me monthly revenue from our Facebook campaigns" without needing a single tutorial.