Tableau – Building up a storyline

Visualisations are a part of business analysis. But it is also very important to communicate your findings effectively. Tableau 10 includes stories, which were first introduced in an update to version 8. Using stories, you create a sequence of story points consisting of worksheets in your workbook. You can use them to build a persuasive narrative about your insights. This article will show you how to create stories. Steps to perform:

• In the Tableau, connect to the databases.
• The data source has three data files – Product, OrderDetails, PropertyInfo. These are three different excel sheet present in one data file.
• Open Product data file.
• Add OrderDetails data file, it contains the information about each order.
• Now you can see there is a join in the two data files.
• If you’ll hover on the join then you can see that there is a inner join using the common key i.e. Product ID. Inner join simply means that there are two files have a field in common and it can be combined easily.
• Next, add the PropertyInfo file and it can be see that it is also joined.
• If you’ll hover the mouse pointer then it can be clearly seen that OrderDetails and PropertyInfo are inner joined using the key – PropertyID.
• Now, that data is completely ready for data visualisation.
• Click Quantity and then at the top right corner of the screen, at the right edge of the toolbar, there is the Show Me button. Visualisation can be obtained using the Show Me option.
• We will create two visualisations as shown in the images
• Now to build up a story. Click on the story button as shown in the image.
• That’s the dashboard and you can see the two sheets that we have prepared.
• Drag and drop the sheet to “Drag a sheet” area
• You can clearly see that how well the two sheets are connected in the story line and thus, now it is in a presentable form.