Tableau Desktop Pocket Reference

Chapter 14. Dashboards and Distribution

Up to this point in the book, all examples have been built and showcased on individual worksheets. While this provides value, particularly for narrowly focused analyses or answering ad hoc questions of your data, these individual views become even more powerful when combined using dashboards.

Tableau Desktop provides this ability via its Dashboard interface, allowing authors to view various aspects of the data in context of each other and create flexible user experiences to help analysts find insights. This chapter shows you how to make a dashboard in Tableau Desktop, discusses aspects of the Dashboard interface, and provides several choices for distributing completed dashboards.

The Dashboard Pane

To create a dashboard in Tableau Desktop, either click the second-to-last tab at the bottom of the Authoring interface or navigate to Dashboard > New Dashboard in the top menu. This opens a new interface containing the Dashboard and Layout panes instead of the Authoring interface’s Data and Analytics panes.

Choosing the Layout and Size of a Dashboard

The first options you see at the top of the Dashboard pane control the layout and size of the dashboard. When Default is selected as the layout, the dashboard will be sized by the dimensions selected in the Size drop-down menu. Every dashboard created in Tableau also comes with a preset Phone layout that will automatically adjust the size and location of dashboard objects when a mobile device is ...