1. Building a KPI dashboard
All right, in this demo screencast we are going to learn how to build a KPI dashboard that you can present to management, which is a very common request. KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are measurable values that track a company's key business objectives.
Let's start by adding some fields to the sheet. We are going to use Usertype and Gender, right-click and then select Add to Sheet for both fields. And then do the same for Count of Trips, right-click and then select Add to Sheet. The table is pretty small at the moment, so let’s drag the sides to increase the width and height. Let’s also increase the size of the values in the table to give them that KPI look and feel. To do this you need to right-click on the values and then click Format to go into the Format pane here on the left. We'll change the font to Tableau Bold and the size to 16. Let's make the values in the boxes blue. As a last step, I'll add the date filter from before to the KPI chart. This way we can look at our KPIs for specific periods in time.
Next, we'll do the same kind of adjustment for the row labels. Make the font Tableau Bold and also 16. This is a good place to talk about how tableau had custom fonts created for themselves so that the text is pixel perfect even if your visualization is tiny or quite large. Let’s also turn off the field label for the columns by right clicking on it and then selecting Hide Field Labels for Column. There you go. Now we have this nice chart that neatly displays the KPIs.
Next, we are going to add this KPI chart, and the one from the previous exercise, to this pre-formatted dashboard right here. Before doing that, let's go to the worksheets and make them fit the entire view. This way the charts will fill up whatever space is available in the dashboard. We'll want to use our KPI chart and put it up here between the two images at the top. I'm going to turn off the title by clicking this little down arrow and then unchecking the title.
Let’s also bring in the other visualization we created. As you can see, when adding sheets to the dashboards, the filters are automatically brought in as well. Let’s remove the duplicate ones (pause). Note that you can also bring in new filters by clicking the down arrow in the gray menu in the upper right corner and then under Filters, select the one you want. For example, Gender. Let's remove it again for now.
Next, I’m going to remove the title like before. Now, to make this so it's interactive and more useful for our end consumer, we will do a couple of things. We'll go to each of these filters and use the drop-down controls to navigate to Apply to Worksheets, and then All Using this Data Source. This will ensure that we have some good interactivity between the elements here. Whenever a filter is applied, every sheet using this data source will filter its content accordingly. Let’s do the same for the other filters. (pause) Let’s add even more interactivity. I’m going to select this visualization and then in the grey menu here select Use as Filter. Great, let's do the same for this one down here. Click the funnel to make it solid so it's used as a filter. Now if you select one of the bars, the data in the KPI chart will filter accordingly and the same is true the other way around. So there are a lot of possibilities now we got these two visualizations into a dashboard together. Over to you!
2. Let's practice!