Introduction to dashboards

Before diving into some practical examples, let's take some time to understand what a dashboard is and why you might create one.

Dashboard definition

From a Tableau perspective, a dashboard is an arrangement of individual visualizations, along with other components, such as legends, filters, parameters, text, containers, images, extensions, buttons, and web objects, that are arranged on a single canvas. Ideally, the visualizations and components should work together to tell a complete and compelling data story. Dashboards are usually (but not always) interactive.

Dashboard objectives

The primary objective of a dashboard is to communicate data to a certain audience with an intended result. Often, we'll talk about telling the data story. That is, there is a narrative (or multiple narratives) contained within the data that can be communicated to others.

While you can tell a data story with a single visualization or even a series...