Dashboards are designed to communicate the meaning of the data to the decision maker. However, decisions are not usually made by one person, which means that dashboards need to be shared. This is very easy if you all have Tableau.
What about the case, however, where not everyone has Tableau? What do you do then in order to share your results? In Tableau, it is very easy to share your results in PowerPoint and via PDF files.
In this topic, we will look for different ways in which to embed a PowerPoint presentation into a Tableau workbook. Later on in this book, we will go through ways of embedding a Tableau workbook in a PowerPoint presentation, but in the meantime, we will start with the simplest option. Embedding a PowerPoint presentation in a Tableau workbook can help to share results since it might help to add context.
Sometimes, you may need to consider printing Tableau workbooks, and we will look at tips to make this easy.
In this recipe, we will continue to use the workbook we created for previous recipes in this chapter.
Before you proceed to do anything in Tableau, you should upload a PowerPoint presentation of your choice to SkyDrive. If you do not have a SkyDrive account, then you are welcome to use the following presentation, which you can access by putting the link into a browser http://bit.ly/JenStirrupOfficialTableauBookCode.
- In this recipe, create a dashboard in the
Chapter FourTableau workbook. - First, we will add a web page component to the dashboard canvas by clicking on the Web Page element on the left-hand side of the dashboard canvas.
You can see an example of this element in the following screenshot:
- When you drag the Web Page element onto the canvas, Tableau will present you with a textbox where you can put the website URL. You can see an example of this textbox in the next screenshot:
- You can also add a textbox to the sheet and give it a title. When you have added a title, the Tableau dashboard will appear as follows:
- If you like, you can add some of the worksheets onto the dashboard in order to combine Tableau worksheets with the PowerPoint presentation.
- What happens if you need to print out the Tableau workbook? To do this, go to the File menu item and select Print to PDF…. You can see an example of this in the following screenshot:
- When you select the Print to PDF… option, you are presented with a small dialog box. There is an illustration of this dialog box in the next screenshot:
- There are a few tips to note, however, when printing PDF files. For example, in the Paper Size drop-down list, there are a number of page sizes available. You can see a sample of the drop-down list in the next screenshot:
- The highlighted option is Unspecified, and it is recommended that you do not select this option, or the paper size of your Tableau workbook will stretch and stretch!
- You can also use the dimensions in order to split the printout into different pages. For example, you could have a new page per year, or per country as in our example here. Let's go through an example of this Tableau feature now.
- Let's duplicate the
KPI by Qworksheet and swap the dimensions around so that the SalesTerritoryCountry dimension is on the Columns shelf, and the DimDate dimension attributes are on the Rows shelf. - Now, let's drag the Year(FullDateAlternateKey) dimension attribute onto the Pages shelf, which is located above the Filters area. You can see an example of where it is located in the following screenshot:
- We need to do some work so that the PDF printout will have a new page per year. To do this, go to the File menu item and select Page Setup….
You can see an example of this location in the following screenshot:
- When you select this option, you are presented with a dialog box, where you can specify how you would like the pages to be printed out.
An example of the dialog box can be found in the following screenshot:
- For our purposes, we will select the Show all pages option under the Pages Shelf configuration, since this will print out a new page for each dimension member. In our example, this will print out a new page for each year.
- Once you have clicked on the OK button, you should now proceed to choose the Print to PDF… option, which you can find under the File menu option.
- Tableau will ask you where you would like to store the file, and once you have saved it to the disk, you can review your file.
- To summarize, Tableau has facilities that will help you to use dashboards as a tool for making decisions and sharing those insights with your colleagues. Even in today's world, some people work best with a printout, and it is good to be able to serve these people in the way they understand data best.
The analytical power of the dashboard is amplified if it is shared with the right audience. Tableau is a great data visualization tool, but you also need to get the message out to the world. Adding it as part of PowerPoint means that you can add contextual information to the dashboard.
By embedding the dashboard and the PowerPoint presentation together, you might find that you end up with scroll bars. If this is the case, be careful that you are not scrunching everything together on one page. If so, it is time to rethink what you are showing on the screen. Less is more! You could think about increasing the interactivity so that it is not so confusing and scrunched up. You could also think about using filters or highlights in order to emphasize some data over others.
You can be careful with the dashboard size by emphasizing the most important data through the careful use of color, size, shape, or the inclusion of annotations, which we will discuss in the next recipe.