Rotating Dashboards in Tableau

Plan:

Why you need TV Dashboards

Main rules of building TV Dashboard

How to create Rotating Dashboards in Tableau

One day I got a project with the following purpose: "To create a way for delivering our company business metrics (and business life) to everyone". After some consideration and thinking over all pros and cons we decided to choose our office TV sets. Then we had to choose a tool for this:

  1. Google Slides & Google Sheets (with built-in options for rotating but worse visualization)
  2. Tableau (nice ETL and Visualization but without rotation option (even good enough workarounds were not found)

We choose the second one and here I tell you about how to create rotating dashboards and how to do it in Tableau.

Why you need TV Dashboards

1. to Show main company indicators in one place

You likely receive a lot of reports and emails, use different services for getting different measures. Something important can pass you by. So it would be a dream to have at least the main indicators on hand.

But what are they - the main indicators? It's the first and very important question you are to answer before getting started. Carry out a survey and try to extract all useful information.

2. to Form transparency & data-driven culture

Transparency means that employees feel the trust, know the company shares the joys and challenges. It's important. But don't forget about confidentiality. There are things the company wants to keep inside. Or some information can be misinterpreted by your clients visiting the office.

3. to Motivate your employees

One possible way is to create separate google slides for each Head of Department and to allow her/him to share the best results of the Department. Other colleagues really feel proud of the best staff of the month.

Main rules of building TV Dashboard

1. Simplicity & clarity

My practice shows that too few persons would stay and stare at multiple charts on 1 slide. It's better to place just 1 or 2 measures per slide and rotate multiple ones at slightly higher speed.

2. Logical grouping and consistency

For people passing by it's easier to get changing information if it has some structure or story.

  1. Use color coding for groups of metrics.
  2. Use the same kind of charts for the same type of information.

3. Nice design

Some researches shows that people stronger believe in pretty charts rather than in negligent ones. So it's really cool if you made something you can meditate.

How to create Rotating Dashboards in Tableau

1. Create separate dashboards that should be rotated (possible in different workbooks)

for TV with 1080р use resolution 1700х960 for a separate sheet or you can experiment

2. Create a web-page with a list of dashboards & display timing (you can post it anywhere, e.g. on github pages or your web-site)

Example A - with 1 frame for less TV memory usage

Example B - with 2 frames for eliminating upload time of a page

also you can add Google Slides in a special format as in the example

3. Create 1 dashboard with 1 “web” sheet linked with your web-page created in previous point

for TV with 1080р use resolution 1728х980