Accelerate Data Analysis by accessing "Dashboards"

Used worldwide by Data analysts "Tableau" excels at conveying useful information in large datasets with a variety of charts and allows us to get meaningful inferences using those visualizations. It can be pie charts, bar graphs, treemaps, and many more; different techniques like calculated fields, parameters, filters can be used to portray relationships and improvise data analysis and help companies with data-driven decisions. One of the important features of the Tableau tool is “Dashboards”.

A dashboard in tableau allows placing multiple charts and controls in a single unit. It allows us to analyze data based on various factors with different visualizations collectively showing at a time and we can interpret insights and trends in data. Moreover, it has a user interaction feature. Dashboards are shown as tabs at the bottom of the Tableau workbook and they get updated with recent data from a data source and change with any change in worksheets, showing a bidirectional communication. In fact, changing a view in Dashboard will change the original worksheet. Dashboards can be static or interactive.

Dashboards are created by adding any worksheets from the workbook. In fact, other objects like texts, images, and webpages can be added to your Dashboard. There is an option to drag and drop your worksheets.

We can make a dashboard for a phone, and we can have an idea of how it will look on a phone or set a default view for the Desktop

Dashboard menu> Device layout > Desktop/ Phone

Also, we can enable the grid option from dropdown for easy alignment of views.

We can configure the size of the layout. There is a default size, but we can adjust that. There is a minimum and maximum set of sizes of dashboard layout. It will be expanded by setting a larger image

Objects in Dashboard

The default approach to arranging worksheets in Dashboard is tiled. Horizontal object helps to arrange sheets horizontally and vertical object arrange them vertically. The floating option lets us resize and move around different elements on the dashboard. Also, we can change and resize any legends that come with a worksheet. Along with the arrangement, we can add texts, webpages, and images to our dashboard view. Moreover, it can be downloaded.

Here we will make a number of different worksheets using Ambulatory visits data from the hospital and then use them to create a dashboard. We start by adding the data set to Tableau by connecting an excel file. We can view our data in tabular form by clicking the view data button. We can create a relation between two data files by joining them in the relationship area through a common column. After getting the data we start working on worksheets. Important components on a worksheet are Data source, Sheets/ Dashboard/ Stories tabs, Menus, Toolbar, Data pane, Analytics pane, Dimensions: Categorical values, Measures/ metrics: continuous values. From the show me tab( right side box), we can control the type of plot we want to apply. We don't need to choose the plots each time we drag and drop attributes to columns and rows, it can automatically generate. Along with different graphs, we can use maps in tableau for analyzing regional data.

Worksheets with visualizations using the data :

Dashboard created using worksheets

Using all these Objects and layouts we can easily customize the Dashboards and use them for storytelling also. Users like to see and connect various aspects of a project or data while filtering and interacting with interpretations. What could be a better feature than Dashboard for that?

References

https://www.tableau.com/learn/get-started/dashboards

https://towardsdatascience.com/from-a-beginner-perspective-understanding-visualization-building-charts-with-tableau-8ae258153719