How to Add Dashboard to Story in Tableau
Putting a dashboard into a Tableau Story transforms it from a simple data display into a guided narrative. It allows you to walk your audience through insights step-by-step, focusing their attention on the most important takeaways. This article explains how to add interactivity and context to your data by combining dashboards with Tableau’s powerful storytelling features.
What is a Tableau Story (And Why Bother Using One)?
Think of a Tableau Story as a presentation built from your data. It’s a sequence of individual worksheets or dashboards arranged in a specific order to tell a data-driven narrative. Instead of static PowerPoint slides, each point in your story is a live, interactive visualization, allowing you to guide your audience through an analysis or explain your findings logically.
Stories are effective because they put you, the analyst, in the driver's seat. Instead of dropping your audience into a complex dashboard and letting them figure it out, you can:
Provide Context: Explain what the data shows and why it matters at each step.
Focus Attention: Use captions and annotations to highlight specific trends, outliers, or key performance indicators.
Build a Narrative Arc: Start with a high-level overview, then drill down into specific details, and conclude with actionable insights, just like you would in a traditional story.
In short, a story frames your dashboard within a logical flow, making your analysis more persuasive and easier for any audience to understand, regardless of their data literacy.
Before You Begin: Prepping Your Dashboard
Before pulling your dashboard into a story, a little preparation ensures a smooth and professional presentation. A dashboard optimized for a standalone view might need a few tweaks to work well within a narrative structure.
1. Clean and Clarify Your Dashboard
A story is about clarity and focus. Take a moment to review your dashboard and remove anything that doesn't serve the story you plan to tell.
Simplify: Hide or remove any unnecessary worksheets, filters, or legends that could distract your audience. Every element should have a purpose.
Use Clear Titles: Ensure your dashboard and each worksheet within it have clear, descriptive titles. A title like "Q3 Regional Profit Analysis" is much better than "Sheet 1."
Check Interactivity: Make sure all your filters, parameters, and dashboard actions work as expected. These interactive elements will still function within your story and are key to drilling down into the data during your presentation.
2. Lock Down Your Sizing
How a dashboard looks on your screen can be very different from how it appears within a story point's fixed frame. To avoid awkward scrollbars or scrunched-up charts, it’s best practice to set your dashboard size before adding it to a story.
Navigate to the Dashboard pane on the left.
Under Size, the default is often "Range" or "Automatic." For storytelling, "Fixed size" gives you the most control.
Select a common size like Generic Desktop (1000 x 800) or another preset that matches your intended display. This ensures every viewer sees your dashboard exactly as you designed it, preserving your layout and spacing.
Step-by-Step: How to Add a Dashboard to a Story
Once your dashboard is polished and ready, embedding it into a story is straightforward. The real power comes from how you build a narrative around it. Follow these steps to get started.
Step 1: Create a New Story
In your Tableau workbook, look at the tabs at the bottom of the screen. Next to the "New Worksheet" and "New Dashboard" icons, you’ll find one for "New Story." Click it to open a blank story canvas.
Step 2: Understand the Story Workspace
The story creation screen has a few key areas:
Story Pane (Left): On the left, you'll see a list of all worksheets and dashboards in your workbook. This is where you’ll find the dashboard you want to add.
Canvas (Center): The large central area is where your dashboard or worksheet will appear.
Navigator (Top): This shows all the "story points" you've created. You can use it to reorder points and build out your presentation. You’ll also find a text box here for writing a caption for each story point.
Sizer (Left): Much like a dashboard, you can control the overall size of your story. Set this to a fixed size for the best result.
Step 3: Drag Your Dashboard onto the Canvas
Find the dashboard you prepared in the Story pane on the left. Click and drag it onto the canvas area that says "Drag a sheet here." Your dashboard will immediately appear, creating your very first story point.
Step 4: Add Your Narrative
This is where data becomes a story. With your dashboard displayed, you can now add context.
Add a Caption: At the top of the canvas, there's a box where you can "Add a caption...". Use this to describe the main takeaway for this story point. For example, "Overall, Q4 sales grew 15% year-over-year, driven by strong performance in the East."
Add Descriptions: You can also drag the Description object from the Story pane onto the canvas to add more detailed text annotations. This is useful for defining terms, explaining calculations, or providing more context.
Building Your Narrative with Multiple Story Points
A single story point is just a starting point. The real value comes from building a sequence that guides your audience through a flow of insights. You use the same dashboard but show different states of it to create your narrative.
1. Create a New Story Point
You have two main options for your next step:
Blank Story Point: Click the "Blank" button in the navigator to create a new, empty point where you can add another worksheet or dashboard.
Duplicate Story Point: This is often more powerful. Click "Duplicate" to create an exact copy of your current story point, including its dashboard, filters, and highlights. This is perfect for a drill-down analysis.
2. Save a Different State of Your Dashboard
Now that you've duplicated your first point, you can interact with the dashboard in the new story point to highlight a new piece of information. Tableau automatically saves this new state for you.
For example, let’s build a simple story:
Story Point 1: The Overview
Your first point shows the complete sales performance dashboard for all products and regions.
Caption: "Overall Q4 sales were strong, meeting our company-wide goals."
Story Point 2: The Drill-Down
Duplicate the first point. In this new story point, use a filter on the dashboard to isolate the 'Technology' product category, which you know has been struggling.
Caption: "However, drilling down reveals the Technology category underperformed by 12%."
Notice how you've now revealed a problem. The 'Technology' filter you applied in this story point will not affect the previous one.
Story Point 3: The Deeper Insight
Duplicate the second point. Keeping the 'Technology' filter, now click to highlight 'Copiers' on your sales by subcategory chart, which has the lowest performance.
Caption: "The biggest driver of this decline was a steep drop in Copier sales starting in November."
In just three steps, using the same dashboard, you’ve told a complete story: you presented a high-level summary, identified a problem area, and pinpointed a root cause.
Best Practices for Effective Storytelling
Once you’ve mastered the mechanics, focus on making your stories as clear and compelling as possible.
One Point, One Idea: Each story point should focus on a single insight. Don’t try to explain four different things at once. Keep the message concise.
Use Descriptive Language: Your captions and descriptions should be direct. Tell the audience exactly what they should be looking at and what it means.
Keep Your Story Short and Memorable: Your ability to communicate insights will improve not only through practice but from how concise you choose to keep your stories. By focusing your viewer and narrowing their cone of sight they won't lose focus or tune you out.
Think About Presentation Mode: When you're finished, click the Presentation Mode button (the projector screen icon) in the top menu to see your story full-screen. This is how your audience will view it, so click through the points to ensure your narrative flows logically.
Final Thoughts
Learning how to add a dashboard to a story in Tableau elevates your ability to communicate with data. It transforms a complex, interactive report into a clear, compelling narrative that guides your audience from observation to insight and, ultimately, to action. By preparing your dashboard correctly and sequencing story points logically, you can present your findings with clarity and impact.
Of course, a powerful story starts with a great dashboard. For marketing and sales teams, manually pulling data from different platforms like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce just to build the initial charts can be the most time-consuming step. We built Graphed to do that heavy lifting for you. You can connect all your sources in just a few clicks and build real-time dashboards simply by asking questions in plain English - no tricky calculations or setup needed. That way, you can spend less time wrangling data and more time building the story that it tells.