Adding elements to the dashboard
1. Adding elements to the dashboard
Welcome back! In this screencast, we're going to look at how we can improve our dashboard by adding some elements to it. Let's start with the map again. The first thing that we're going to do here in the worksheet, before adding it to the dashboard, is to create an area annotation. This will show users where Chicago's downtown area is located. I can do that by right-clicking on the map and then under “Annotate” selecting “Area”. I just click OK here and you can see that this little box shows up. Let's format this box first. I'll right-click and then click “Format”. I’m going to make it transparent, so shading is set to None. Next, for the border we're going to select a dotted line, that’s a little bit thicker, and let's change the color to red. Let’s also make the borders rounded. There we go. So now we’ve got this box and we can drag it approximately where Chicago's downtown area is. Now we are ready to add this worksheet to the dashboard. I'm going to create a new dashboard and rename it to “High Traffic Stations”. Let’s drag the map in there and change the size to automatic so that the dashboard fills up the entire space. Next, I’ll remove the Trip Duration size legend to clear up some space. I can do it by simply clicking the little cross here. Now, let's add some more information to this dashboard to make it more intuitive. The first thing I'm going to do is go to the objects section, here on the left in the dashboard. I want to add a text field where I can include a short explanation of what is shown in the dashboard. I’ll drag a Text object over to the legend pane and add the explanation message. Let's make the word “Explanation” bold. There you go. I’m going to add another text object with some more information on the circle colors. Let's make the font size a little bit bigger, size 14, and make the word “red” appear in red. As you can see, the text box appears next to the map but I want it to float on top of it. The way to do that is to click on this little down arrow and select “Floating”. And now I can move it to wherever I want on the map. That looks good. The next step is adding an informative title to this dashboard. We are going to make that title dynamic meaning it changes based on the filter selections in the dashboard. First, I’m going to create a new worksheet and name it “Date Time Titles”. Let’s change it to fit the width of the worksheet. Now, I’ll add the number of trips to the Text marks card. Let's edit that to use a font size of 11, right-align, and add the word “Trips” at the end to make it more clear. The next step is to show Time Block as a filter and drag Start Time over to the pages shelf. We are interested in continuous months. Next, I am going to edit the worksheet title. Double click on it and delete everything but the page name, which is the continuous month we just added to the Pages shelf. Let's change it to be Tableau Bold, font size 24. Below that, I’ll add the Time block by clicking on “Insert” and then here all the way at the bottom selecting Time Block. To make it display nicely, I’ll make that one a little bit smaller, size 16 and then right-align everything. Great, so now everything shows up here and as you can see if we change the filters or go to a different month page, the title is going to automatically change. The last thing we want to do on this sheet, is make sure that the shading of the worksheet is transparent. This is because we want to drop it on top of our map. The way to do that is to click on Format, here at the top, then navigate to Shading, and for Worksheet select “None”. There we go. What we can do now, is go back to our dashboard and drag this new sheet into the dashboard. Let’s change it to be floating and then add it here on the right side. I’m also going to hide the original dashboard title. Now we have an informative dashboard that helps us better understand the performance of the top stations. Your turn to enrich your dashboards using dashboard objects!2. Let's practice!
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