Sunday 4 January 2015

Tableau Tips: Tiled or Floating?

So, you've managed to get all the difficult stuff out of the way. You've found some interesting data, you've formatted it in such a way that Tableau can read it, you've created some pretty cool looking worksheets. The final piece of the Viz Puzzle is of course the all important dashboard.

If you're relatively new to Tableau, the dashboarding aspect can be a little bit daunting. Not because it's difficult - Tableau make it pretty easy actually - but because there are just so many ways in which you can lay out those sheets you've spent a great deal of time working on. One thing that struck me a couple of weeks back was the Tiled and Floating options available:


A colleague who is fairly new to Tableau was looking at a few dashboards I'd produced and comparing them to some of his own. He was having issues fitting everything he wanted into his dashes and was unaware of the Tiled and Floating options and how both can help the user structure their dashboards. I'll give a bit of an overview as to what these can do for you over the next few posts, however it's always personal preference, the data itself and/or the requirements of the end user that will dictate which option you use.

Tiled

The Tiled option is very swift and straightforward, you can either double-click on the sheet name you wish to insert and Tableau will place it into the most logical place it sees in your workspace similar to that below:


That obviously looks pretty horrific, but with some tweaking it can be made to look a lot better. A pet hate of my own is that big space beneath the legend. If you go with the auto-layout, that space will only ever be filled with legends and filter menus. If you don't have many, it ends up being a waste of space that cramps up your dashboard.

My preference though with the Tiled option is to click and drag the sheets to the exact space that I want them. Doing this gives you a little more control over where everything goes, with the following result:


Next time up, I'll look at the Floating option, which is the one I generally use, as it gives me a lot more control over what goes where. In the meantime though, I'll leave you with my quick Viz on the career of one of the Football's true greats: Ferenc Puskas, the Magic Magyar. Just take a look at the Average Goals Per Game over the course of his career, staggering! Though I'm sure Messi and Ronaldo will at least compete on that front:



No comments:

Post a Comment