1. Working with containers
Alright, in this screencast we are going to use containers to serve as placeholders for some titling elements and we're going to clean up the legend and filters on the right hand side of the dashboard. I'm going to start by going to the object section over here and taking a horizontal container. Let’s drag it all the way to the top here, and make it a little bit smaller. There we go. Now we have this container placeholder to which we can add elements. Remember that because we used a horizontal container the elements that are added will show up next to each other. Let's first take a text element and add it to the container. I'm going to add the title of the dashboard, which is “station analysis”, here. Set the font to Tableau bold and change the size to 26 to make it easier to read.
Next, I'm going to add the Divvy logo. Adding your company logo is always a nice thing to do when creating dashboards for your organization. The way to do that is to take an Image object and drag it next to the title. We just need to choose an image here. I'm going to select the image on my local computer. Navigate to the logo of choice, fit and center the image, and click OK. Now the Divvy logo shows up here. Let's resize so it doesn't take up the entire space. That looks good right? Now we have our logo and next to it the title, which was really easy because we used that horizontal container.
Next, I'm going to add another text object on the right side of the title. This text box will display the instructions for using the filter, so I’ll add “Select and apply filter”. Let's use Tableau Bold once again, and set the font size to 12. Done, that's ready to add a filter next to it.
Now that the title header is done, I’m going to clean up the dashboard legend here on the right. What I'm going to do is remove this filter from the dashboard together with the size legend for Trip Duration. Note that by removing the filter from the dashboard, I’m not automatically clearing it. Let’s remove the Time Block filter as well to show this. First, I’ll filter for Afternoon only. You can see that this bar chart changed based on the selection. If I now remove the filter from the dashboard, the filter is still applied. I can see that on the Filter shelf of the corresponding worksheet as well. Let’s clear the filter, and go back to the dashboard. I can bring the Time Block filter in again by clicking this down arrow and under filters, selecting Time Block. Next, I'm going to customize the filter by adding an Apply button like this. Lastly, I’ll make it floating by clicking the little arrow and navigating to “Floating” right here. This allows me to add it next to that filter instruction text box I just added. There we go, now we have this nice section where end users can find the filter together with the instructions on how to use it.
The last thing I'm going to do is take this color legend and make it floating as well. Let’s add this to the “Starts by Day” bar chart. That way the legend is close to the chart that it applies to and it's easy and intuitive to interpret. There we go, that's it, once again we enhanced the dashboard we had to make it more intuitive.
Your turn!
2. Let's practice!