标签：#tableau

By the end of this page you can look at a folder of eight finished sheets and say which two or three belong on the dashboard, which one goes in the upper-left corner, and which of Tableau's three sizing options to pick. You'll also have a one-sentence test that decides every one of those calls. It's about fifteen minutes. Here's the move to make today. Open your busiest dashboard and write the single question it answers, in one sentence, for one named person. Then remove every view that isn't part of answering it. Most people delete half, and the half that survives lands harder than the whole thing did. The short version: Tableau's own guidance is two or three views on a dashboard. Crowding is what happens when one dashboard is asked to serve several audiences at once. Where the surviving views sit is the second decision, and it has a known answer, so that gets the picture. The original carries a diagram here. In words: A single dashboard rectangle divided into three panes. One large pane occupies the whole upper-left area and spans most of the width. Two smaller panes sit below it, side by side. A curved arrow enters at the top-left corner of the large pane, travels right across it, then drops down and moves left to right across the two smaller panes, showing the order a reader takes them in. A small numeral one sits on the large pane, two and three on the smaller panes. The drawing shows that the first thing a reader meets is whatever occupies the upper left, so the most important view belongs there and the supporting views belong underneath. 1. Why two or three, and where that number comes from Before the explanation: you have eight finished sheets and one dashboard. How many of them would you put on it? Two or three. That's not a taste call, it's Tableau's published guidance: "In general, it's a good idea to limit the number of views you include in your dashboard to two or three." The reason is about attention rather than about screen space. A dashboard is read,

By the end of this guide you will have a published Tableau dashboard and a three-point story, built on a real dataset. It lives on a public URL you can put in an application. You build four small sheets. Each one makes exactly one point. You arrange them on a single screen, then walk a reader through them in three steps that end with a recommendation. Every step says what to click and what you should see afterwards. Four small sheets, rather than a wall of charts, because a dashboard has to argue for something. A screen holding everything you could build leaves the reader to work out what matters. Most readers will not do that work. Dashboard vs Story, in one line. A dashboard puts several charts on one screen so someone can explore. A story is a sequence of views with captions, clicked through in order, so someone is walked to a conclusion. Build both: the dashboard is what a hiring manager glances at, the story is what proves you can think. The original carries a diagram here. In words: Four separate worksheets stack on the left: a big single number, a set of vertical bars, a set of horizontal bars, and a scatter of circles. An arrow points right to one dashboard panel that holds all four of them arranged on a single screen: the number across the top, the two bar charts side by side in the middle, the scatter along the bottom. A second arrow points right to three story cards numbered one, two and three, each showing one of those views with a caption line above it. The worked example. Every instruction below is written against a real, free dataset: the Telco Customer Churn file on Kaggle, 7,043 customers, one row each. A finished analysis of it, including the Python script that shapes the data, is public at telco-churn-analysis . Swap in your own dataset and the steps do not change, only the field names do. Step 1: Shape the data before you open Tableau Tableau is a display layer. Deriving something inside it takes longer than deriving it upstream in SQL, Python or