Tableau is a leading technology that shows data in a much comprehensive and comprehendible way. Comprehensive because you can show multiple things together and can tell a story out of numbers, and comprehendible because it is easier to understand graphically and helps you induce thinking about the graph. However, bringing your visualizations from “better” to “best” takes time, practice, patience and some knowledge of visual analysis best practices Here are some of the best practices to make your visualization more interactive and creative.

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6 Tableau
Visualization Tips to Inspire
your Creative Eyes

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SHEET SWAPPING
If there’s a requirement of only a specific sheet in a dashboard for a presentation, you can do that by
creating a sheet selector
 Create a string Parameter “Select a Sheet” listing
all the worksheet names in the subsequent text
boxes. For example, All, Account Mapping, Top 10
Accounts by Pipeline and then click OK
 Create a Calculated Field “view” and in the
formula text box, type the name of the parameter
you have created in step 1 i.e. “Select a Sheet”
 For each sheet in your workbook, drag the Calculated Field “view” to the filter
shelf and select “Custom Value List” option to add the name of a specific sheet.
For example, for Accounts Mapping add ‘All & Accounts Mapping’ to “Custom
value List” and click OK
 Go to the new Dashboard and drag each sheet to the dashboard after selecting
vertical layout container
 Select “Parameter” by right clicking the upper right corner of the dashboard and
then select the parameter you created in step 2, “Select a sheet” in this case
 This displays the “Sheet Selector” that can be used to display individual sheets
on dashboard

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 Decide what trend you want to show in tooltips and create a “Calculated Field”. Example shows percentage of
opportunities won and lost, creating 2 “Calculated Field” % won and % Lost
 Create another “Calculated Field” to create calculated bar field which represents the bar length for one of the
dimension members (%won and % lost in this case. In the formula text box :
 LEFT("█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
",ROUND(([Opp_Won]/COUNTD([Opportunity ID])*100)))
 Formula: The first part of the calculation (“█”) is the characters that makes up the bar length. Because percentage of
total calculation is a rounding off of 100, placing 100 “█” in the calculation to represent the accurate value
 Drag & Drop your calculated field (%Win and % Lost) on tooltip and format the text (color, font, size) according to our
requirement
ADDING CHARTS IN TOOL TIPS
To avoid the difficulty in displaying trends on views like maps or scatter plots, here’s what you can do as
bar graphs within tooltips

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DYNAMIC TITLES
Dynamically updating titles or current date on dashboards is a good practice to make the dashboards
very interactive
 Go to the dashboard where you want to display the title. Double click on
title you want to change
 In “Edit title” dialog box add filter name you want to update. In the
example we want to update “Account Name” as soon as the filter is
changed.
 Formula is :- <Account Name>'s Lifetime value and Click ok
 For ‘Current Date’ create a “Calculated Field” named
‘Today’. Click in the “Formula Box”, double-click
‘TODAY’ in the Functions list and click OK
 Drag ‘Today’ onto Detail, right-click “YEAR(Today)” and
select ‘More>Custom>Detail’ drop-down
‘List>Month/Day/Year’
 Select worksheet > Show Title. Double click on “Title”
shelf and select “Edit Title”, erase the title listed, click
on the ‘insert’ button and select MDY(Today) and click
OK

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DRILL DOWN USING ACTIONS
It is very convenient to be able to add an action that links one dashboard to another so you can create a
drill down effect
 For this action, you must have two
dashboards ‘Account Mapping’ and
‘Opportunity Won/Lost’ in this case
 Go to ‘Account Mapping’ dashboard.
Click on “Dashboard > Actions >Add
Action > Filter”. In “source sheet” select
‘Account Mapping’ and in “Target Sheet”
select ‘Opportunities Won/Lost’.
 “Run action on: Select” and Select “Show
all values”
 Select “Selected Fields” in “Target
Filters”. Click on source filed to add
‘Physical State/Province’ in this case, and
click OK

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USING HYPERLINKS IN TOOL TIPS
Linking tableau dashboards back to web user interface is a prerequisite of tableau users. This can easily
be achieved using Tableau “Actions”
 Go to “Account Summary” dashboard. Click on
“Dashboard > Actions > Add Actions > URL”
 “Name” - That will appear as a hyperlink.
‘Accounts from SFDC’ for this example
 “Source sheet” - Select Dashboard and Sheet
for the action
 “URL” - http://test.salesforce.com for this
example
 Check “URL Encode Data Values” and “Allow
Multiple Values”
 Select “Run action on> Menu” to show URL in
tooltip and then click OK

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PLOT MORE THAN 2 MEASURES IN A GRAPH USING REFERENCE LINE
 Place ‘Dimension-Stage’ in “columns” and ‘Salesforce Projected Revenue’ and ‘Amount’ in “Rows”
 From marks shelf, select line graph
 Drop third parameter on details, ‘OpportunityId’ in this case and right click to measure ‘distinct count’ of opportunities
 Right click on ‘rows axis’, go to “Add Reference Line”, select “Line” > ‘Per Cell’
 In value column select 3rd parameter > Total, ‘CNTD (Opportunity ID)’ in this case and select “value” from drop down
under “Label”
 Under “Formatting” select “line” colour and “Fill Below” colour and click OK
 “Format” column banding by right clicking on bar graphs > Format

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Thank you