Every dashboard seeks to tell a story by giving a clear picture of a certain set of information. Before designing a dashboard, you should understand what story the data tells. How you tell the story will depend on numerous factors, such as your audience, the way the audience will access the dashboard, and what response you want to elicit from your audience.

Stephen Few defines a dashboard as a "visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance." This definition is helpful because it places some key boundaries around the data story and the way we will seek to tell it in Tableau. In general, your story should follow these guidelines: