1. Dashboards and stories
In the final part of this course you will get an introduction to dashboards and stories. You've built good-looking visualizations in the previous exercises, and as we build more of them, it will be really convenient to see them all on one page.
By using a dashboard, a built-in Tableau feature, we can easily do that.
2. Dashboards
On this slide you can see a dashboard built using the Videogames dataset. It contains four visualizations about the Playstation product family, and gives insights on the sales by platform, the top video games and the top genres.
3. Dashboard
A dashboard is a collection of several views. It makes it easy to compare data and helps uncover key insights.
The data is automatically connected to your worksheets, so if you make a change on a worksheet it will automatically be visible on your dashboard and vice versa. Dashboards are interactive: more advanced dashboards contain filters and allow users to drill down and do their own analysis.
Views can be connected, allowing one view to function as an interactive filter. We will go through a live example to dig deeper in this in the next video.
4. Stories
Useful dashboard or worksheet insights can be bookmarked using stories.
In other words, a story is a sequence of visualizations that work together to tell a story or a narrative. Since people tend to understand and remember concepts better through stories, they might be a very effective tool for your business case.
Each individual visualization in a story is called a story point.
5. Stories
This is an example of a story in Tableau. It allows you to cycle between two story points. The first story point called Platform Comparison, enables the user to compare sales across Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo.
6. Stories
The second story point allows the user to deepdive into a certain product family such as Playstation, where sales by platform can be investigated.
7. How does everything fit together?
So how does everything fit together? Let’s make an analogy using Russian dolls. A worksheet can be placed into a dashboard as we saw in the Playstation example.
The first story we saw contained two dashboards: one to compare product families and one to deepdive into platforms. A worksheet can thus be placed into a dashboard, and a dashboard can be placed into a story.
Although it doesn't happen frequently, just as with Russian dolls you can also fit a worksheet straight into a story.
8. Let's practice!
It's time to see if you understand the difference between a worksheet, a dashboard, and a story. Good luck!