Building dashboards in Tableau (while a super fun process) can definitely feel a bit daunting at times. There are a lot of moving parts to think about: what charts to include, how to layout your design, which filters and parameters to use, and most importantly, how to make it all intuitive for your users.
However, at its core, a good dashboard should do one thing: tell a clear story with the data. Whether it’s guiding users through high-level KPIs or giving them tools to drill into specifics, each element should have a purpose. And in a consulting context, that purpose often ties back to your client’s goals so communication and clarity become even more important.
In this final part of the series, I’ll take you through how I pulled all the individual components together from the original sketches and worksheets to build a fully functioning, interactive dashboard using Tableau’s Superstore dataset.
One key feature I focused on this time around when building the dashboard was to construct everything using containers. Now, I won’t dive too deep into why we use containers here (shameless plug [I know again] - you can check out my blog on that here), but trust me when I say that using containers properly is a game-changer. It makes alignment of sheets a breeze, keeps your layout consistent across screen sizes, and just overall makes the dashboard feel cleaner and more professional.
Looking back at the design and technical sketch I put together (shared in my second blog), these became a really handy guide to help plan the structure of each page. They outlined how the sheets would stack, which and where to use containers, where key elements like filters and nav buttons would live, and how the different dashboard views would transition between one another. Having that reference meant I wasn’t just dragging and dropping aimlessly, I actually had a plan so it took a lot less time to construct than expected.
Now there were some features/amendments I had to make within the dashboard. The first was creating worksheets that had headers text on instead of using text objects from the dashboard. The reason for this was so that we can add dashboard actions to the dashboard, where if the user was to click on the worksheet in the dashboard, it would take them to the next page.
Another alteration that needed to be made was with the filter page, specifically on the year filter/select year. For the Overview tabs, these used a select year parameter as this gave you the option to compare the selected years results against the previous year. Whilst this could be implemented in the Orders Summary table, this would limit the spread of the data to only being 1 years worth. Instead, I change the select year parameter on the filter bar in the Orders Summary to be a years filter instead, so users can choose to see the range of orders between a specific time period
So with that being said, here are some snippets of the build process of the dashboard and how I constructed all the pages:
Honestly, I can’t emphasise enough how helpful the sketching process was. Even if it wasn’t the cleanest or most technical at first, just having something visual to work from kept me focused and helped avoid a lot of backtracking. I used to dive straight into Tableau and figure it out as I went, but taking that extra bit of time to plan up front really paid off.
And with that, we’ve reached the end of this blog series!
It’s been such a rewarding experience working on this personal project, from the early planning and sketching, to experimenting with parameter-driven KPIs, creatively building out the orders table, and finally piecing everything together into one coherent, interactive dashboard. There were moments where things didn’t quite go as expected, where I had to get a bit creative (or "hacky"), but that’s all part of the learning journey and honestly, that’s where some of the best lessons come from.
You can check out the final dashboard here on my Tableau Public page:
Thank you so much for taking the time to read through this series. Whether you followed it from the beginning or just jumped in here, I hope it’s given you a few new tips, ideas, or even just a bit of inspiration for your own Tableau projects.
Victor