Setting up a Dashboard

Data Visualization and Design | CUNY Graduate Center | Summer 2019

Link to Video

This tutorial will show you how to collect your visualizations into a Dashboard and publish that dashboard to Tableau Public. You will learn how to arrange your visualizations, resize them to fit, add captions and text boxes and critically consider how a user moves through the story you want to tell.

Goals

By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to: * Organize visualizations in Tableau Dashboards * Use text to orient your user

Data

Restaurant Recomendations DHUM 7300 that you cleaned in previous tutorials and the visualizations you made in the Simple Restaurant Visualizations Lab.

Steps

Begin by watching this video

We are going to put 4 of our 5 visualizations together on a dashboard. You do not always have to create a dashboard for every project (particularly in this class where you will be writing a blog post around your visualizations), but you should be familiar with how to build them as dashboards are still the most common way to disseminate information (though story boards/ story points are quickly catching up).

1. Select the ‘New Dashboard’ icon at the bottom of the page.
2. First imagine your hypothetical user. Is your user coming to this dashboard to get recommendations about restaurants they should try? Are they interested in
3. Drag at least 3 of your visualizations onto the page. If you find that you need to change something, go back to the visualization – do not do it in the dashboard.
4. You can resize your visualizations if you need to by dragging the corners.
5. Add a text box at the top to introduce the topic and the questions that can be answered with this dashboard
6. Be sure to cite where your data came from (usually this appears in a textbox in the bottom right corner)

7. Adjust your labels as necessary to help your reader understand your visuals.

8. The last thing we need to do is go back to our Data Source Page and select Data ‘Extract’ rather than connection because we cannot publish an active Google Sheet with a dashboard (this is for your own safety). Once you’ve completed that, your dashboard is ready to be published.

SAVE YOUR DASHOBOARD and your project before doing this step – it can be a little buggy.

1. Select the connections icon on the far right of the screen.
2. Select Publish to Tableau Public
3. Enter your credentials.

Congratulations on your dashboard!!

Publish this to your Tableau Public Page and send Michelle an email with the link. If you do not have a Tableau Public Account yet, please set one up. You do not need to use the same email that you registered Tableau with.

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Tutorial written by Michelle McSweeney, PhD for Introduction to Data Visualization, a course in the M.A. in Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center at CUNY. More information about the program is available here.