The dashboard interface is similar to the worksheet workspace in many ways. In the following screenshot, we have identified its several key areas.
Like the worksheet view, the dashboard has the following elements:
We have numbered the elements on the dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot. They are as follows:
If you are creating a new dashboard, the canvas will be blank. If you open an existing dashboard, the various existing dashboard elements will be displayed on the canvas. The following screenshot shows the dashboard interfaces:
It's important to keep in mind the purpose of your dashboard. We are building a dashboard that tells the story of carbon dioxide emissions over time. The dashboard should allow users to navigate to the areas of interest and then understand the factors of consumption.
The dashboard will have the following key elements, which were previously discussed:
In order to build this dashboard, we will start with a single visualization, which is the visualization with summary data in this case. Drag a sheet onto the canvas by hovering over the visualization that you want to add, pressing the left mouse button, and dragging it onto the canvas, as depicted in the following screenshot. You can also double-click on the worksheet name.
If you wish to remove a worksheet from the dashboard, click on the title of the visualization until a grey container bar appears at the top border of the visualization. Then, right-click on the grey bar. Select Remove from Dashboard from the shortcut menu:
The result, as shown in the following screenshot, shows the map that we created. This map shows the CO2 emissions per capita in 2008, which was taken from the World Bank official website. Each country is colored by its relative percentile in the data set, and the label shows the CO2 emissions per capita.
However, users don't know all of that yet:
Tableau Public automatically added the following two elements:
In order to compose an empathetically designed user experience with proper context, we need to use layout containers to rearrange the dashboard and create a flow of both navigation and information, that is, a data story. The next section discusses layout objects, and we will show examples of how to use them.
Tableau Public has several different layout objects that you can add to your dashboard to control the composition.
Objects are versatile, and you can use them to reflect the overall theme of your graphic composition. From the context menu of an object, you can perform the following tasks:
You can set the height and width attributes for floating objects, just like you can for worksheets that you have added (and for the dashboard as a whole, which is highly encouraged).
The following objects can be added to your dashboard:
In the section of the dashboard pane that says New objects, the default object is set to Tiled. You should leave it there until you are comfortable with dashboard design. Each new object that you add to your dashboard will have this setting, and though you can easily change the attribute for individual sheets on a dashboard, it's best to keep things simple in the beginning. The Tiled automatically aligns objects to the dashboard grid, and floating adds new objects to the dashboard that are detached from the dashboard grid.
When you add objects, like worksheets, into a horizontal or vertical layout container, the widths and heights of the objects will be sized automatically, unless you specify otherwise. In case you're using actions, which will be discussed in the next chapter, it's particularly useful to use containers for sizing automatically.