Chapter 1, A Short Dash to Dashboarding!, introduces you to the Tableau interface while ensuring that you are producing dashboards quickly.

Chapter 2, Summarizing Your Data for Dashboards, teaches you how to summarize data as a way of conveying key messages on your dashboards for top-down analysis. It also introduces you to calculations with a particular focus on using dates for analysis and comparison.

Chapter 3, Interacting with Data for Dashboards, guides you through to the next stage after summarizing your data, interacting with your data, and providing more details where appropriate to enhance the story on the dashboard.

Chapter 4, Using Dashboards to Get Results, presents ways to make your dashboards actionable for the dashboard viewer. We will look at a guided analysis in Tableau as a way of facilitating a structured investigation of data. We will also research the ways of enhancing your data via mashups and external data sources, all in your dashboard.

Chapter 5, Putting the Dash into Dashboards, focuses on graphically presenting the data with Tableau dashboards in mind. We will look at sparklines, KPIs, small multiples, and maps, to name a few.

Chapter 6, Making Dashboards Relevant, guides you through the ways in which you can make the dashboards relevant to your organization. We will look at theming and adding more details to the dashboard.

Chapter 7, Visual Best Practices, provides examples of the more advanced features of Tableau, such as calculations. The recipe exercises are underpinned by an explanation of the visual best practices as we proceed through the chapter.

Chapter 8, Tell the World! Share Your Dashboards, shows different ways to share your dashboards with different audiences, both inside and outside your organization.

You need the following in order to work with Tableau:

If you are a business user or a developer who wants to create Tableau dashboards quickly and easily while learning about data visualization theory and techniques as you go along, then this book is for you. It applies the practice and theory of data visualization to dashboards while helping you to deliver effective Tableau dashboards.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "On Twitter, #dataviz is a well-used hashtag."

A block of code is set as follows:

IF ( SUM([SalesAmount]) - WINDOW_AVG(SUM([SalesAmount]), First(), Last() ) < 0 )
Then 'Below Average'
Else 'Above or Equal To Average'
END

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "At the bottom of the entry page, you can see a section called Sample Workbooks that contains some examples."

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