As a Tableau certified associate consultant, Tableau is my go-to tool for building interesting custom reports that help our clients visualize, understand, and make decisions based on their data. But recently, Tableau launched new, more powerful functionality. It’s called Metrics and it’s got me crushing on Tableau even more.
I’m a fan of polished, simple, and clean reporting. I prefer telling my client’s data story using a couple large callouts, a few easy-to-understand visualizations, and a helpful icon rather than a fancy, four-custom-color quadrant with bubbles layered on a Venn diagram, for example. Personalizing and customizing data to support detailed findings is more my style than flashy filtering, though I do appreciate a good filter. Anyway, this is where Metrics comes in.
A Metric is a new type of visual that is fully integrated with Tableau's data and analytics platform. Tableau Metrics can be created from nearly any dashboard, enabling business users to track their business data like stocks in an investment portfolio. If you have multiple dashboards you frequently check, you can create Metrics for the key numbers from those dashboards and monitor them all at once by adding them to your favorites or publishing them to the same project.
Another reason to love this new release: Metrics stays up-to-date to automatically display the most recent values from your connected views. Metrics can be managed, organized, and favorited just like workbooks with custom permissions, search, share, and sort. Data is easily accessible and always available at-a-glance right from the Metric card or grid view, plus you can open the Metric to view more details, such as past values, description, and get quick link to the dashboard view used to create the Metric.
Have you tried using the new Metrics content? It has really added to the power and impact my data visualizations can have, and at the same time allowed me to stay true to my philosophy that tidy, impactful visualizations are oftentimes more digestible than the highly engineered, albeit visually stunning, ones.
Examples of Tableau Dashboards
Sometimes, however, digestible and stunning dashboards go hand-in-hand. For inspiration on how to achieve this, I’ll often look at the dashboards others have shared to Tableau Public (public.tableau.com), a free platform that allows thousands of users to share and explore data visualizations of just about any public data topic. Here are three examples of dashboards that inspire me to find better and more creative ways to help visualize data for my clients. They remind me that data is part of everyday life and that there is always a way to SHOW someone the information, not just tell them about it. I hope you take a peek!
The Air We Breathe - I like this one because I am a sucker for a good map visual. I also like the simple, yet powerful interactions in the viz, like allowing the user toggle between city and population to get a sense of how much denser the population is in those city's with poorer air quality.
How many Skittles are in your breakfast cereal? – There is a lot happening on this Tableau dashboard, but I think it’s fun, creative visual and a good example of how to present data in a way that needs very little explanation. Even without reading the description, you immediately get a sense of what this viz is showing from the title and the visuals.
Who's talking in popular films? - This is a great example of using some key numbers as call outs at the top, and as your eye moves down the dashboard you see the data supporting those numbers. It very quickly and clearly makes a point through the call out numbers, and then lets the viewer dive deeper into the data with the bubble chart below that breaks down each data point further when you hover over a specific point.
