How to Create a Metrics Dashboard in Tableau
Creating a great Tableau dashboard is your fastest route from raw, messy data to clear, actionable insights your team can rally around. It transforms endless rows in a spreadsheet into a visual story that highlights what's working and what isn't. This article guides you through building a powerful metrics dashboard from the ground up, starting with core planning and finishing with an interactive report ready for your team.
Before You Open Tableau: Planning Your Dashboard's Purpose
The biggest mistake people make is jumping straight into Tableau without a plan. Five minutes of planning can save you five hours of redesigning later. Before you connect a single data source, take a moment to answer three crucial questions.
1. Identify Your Audience
Who is this dashboard for? The needs of a CEO are completely different from those of a campaign manager.
Executives: They typically want a high-level overview. Think big-picture KPIs, year-over-year trends, and overall business health. They need to understand performance in 30 seconds or less.
Marketing Team: They need granular detail. They want to see campaign performance, cost per acquisition (CPA) by channel, conversion rates, and the ability to drill down into specific ads or keywords.
Sales Managers: Their focus is on pipeline, team performance, deal velocity, and quota attainment. They need to see which reps are excelling and where deals are getting stuck.
Tailoring the metrics and complexity to your audience is the single most important factor for dashboard adoption.
2. Define Key Questions
A good dashboard doesn’t show everything, it answers specific, important questions. Instead of just "showing sales data," frame your objective around questions like:
"Which marketing channels are driving the most qualified leads this quarter?"
"How does our regional sales performance compare against targets?"
"What is the weekly trend of new user sign-ups versus churn?"
Writing these questions down gives your dashboard a clear purpose and helps you avoid adding distracting, irrelevant information.
3. Choose Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Once you know who you're building for and what questions you need to answer, you can select the right KPIs. These are the specific, measurable metrics that will provide the answers.
For the question about marketing channels, your KPIs would be Leads by Source, Conversion Rate by Channel, and Cost Per Lead by Channel.
For the regional sales question, you’d use Sales Revenue vs. Target by Region, Number of Deals Won, and Average Deal Size.
Step 1: Connecting and Preparing Your Data
With a solid plan in hand, it’s time to get your data into Tableau. A clean data connection is the foundation of any reliable dashboard.
Connecting to a Data Source
When you first open Tableau, you'll see a "Connect" pane on the left side of the screen. This is your gateway to your data. Tableau supports a vast range of data sources, but most people start with one of three common types:
To a File: This includes Microsoft Excel, CSV files, and PDFs. Simply click the file type you need and locate it on your computer.
To a Server: This is for connecting to databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Microsoft SQL Server. You'll need credentials like the server name, username, and password.
Cloud Sources: You can connect directly to platforms like Google Sheets, Amazon Redshift, or Snowflake.
Select your data source and follow the prompts to connect. Once connected, you'll be brought to the Data Source page.
The Data Source Page
This screen gives you a preview of your data and lets you prepare it for analysis. You can perform simple joins here by dragging tables from the left pane into the canvas. For example, you might drag your "Orders" table and your "Customers" table into the canvas to join them on a common field like "Customer ID."
Take a moment to check your data types. Tableau is usually smart about this, but it's good practice to ensure dates are recognized as dates (a small calendar icon) and geographic fields are recognized as locations (a globe icon). Correcting these now will make building your charts much easier.
Step 2: Building Your Individual Charts and KPIs
In Tableau, you build individual charts, tables, and KPIs in "Worksheets." Each worksheet you create is a building block that you will later assemble on your final dashboard. Let's create a few common and highly useful visualizations.
Creating a KPI Card (Big, Clear Numbers)
KPI cards are perfect for displaying your most important metrics right at the top of your dashboard. Let's say we want to show total sales.
Click the "New Worksheet" icon at the bottom of the screen.
From the "Data" pane on the left, find your "Sales" measure and drag it onto the "Text" box in the "Marks" card.
You’ll see the sales number appear in the view. It will probably be small. To format it, click on the "Text" box in the Marks card again.
In the pop-up editor, you can change the font, make it bigger (e.g., 24pt), and make it bold. You can also add descriptive text like "Total Sales:" above the number.
Rename your sheet something descriptive, like "KPI - Total Sales," by double-clicking the tab at the bottom.
Building a Bar Chart to Compare Categories
Bar charts are excellent for comparing performance across different categories, like sales by region.
Create a new worksheet.
Drag a dimension, like "Region," from the Data pane and drop it onto the "Columns" shelf at the top.
Drag a measure, like "Sales," and drop it onto the "Rows" shelf.
Tableau will instantly generate a vertical bar chart. To make it more useful, you can also drag the "Sales" measure onto the "Color" box in the Marks card to create a color gradient, and onto the "Label" box to display a value on top of each bar. Rename the sheet "Sales by Region."
Creating a Line Chart to Show Trends Over Time
Line charts are the best way to visualize performance over a period of time.
Create a new worksheet.
Find your date dimension, like "Order Date," and drag it onto the "Columns" shelf. Tableau will likely default this to YEAR(Order Date).
Drag your measure, perhaps "Profit," onto the "Rows" shelf. You'll see a line chart showing profit by year.
To see a more granular trend, right-click on the "YEAR(Order Date)" pill in the Columns shelf and select "Month" (the second one, not the discrete one) to get a continuous monthly view.
Rename your sheet "Profit Trend." Now you have three building blocks ready for your dashboard.
Step 3: Assembling Your Dashboard
With your worksheets built, it's time for the fun part: arranging them into a cohesive dashboard.
Creating the Dashboard Canvas
At the bottom of the screen, next to the "New Worksheet" icon, is the "New Dashboard" icon. Click it to open a blank canvas. On the left, you'll see a list of all the worksheets you've just created.
Arranging Your Worksheets
Simply drag your worksheets from the left pane onto the dashboard canvas. As you drag your first sheet, it will fill the entire space. When you drag your second sheet, Tableau will show you gray shaded areas where you can place it (e.g., to the top, bottom, left, or right of the first sheet).
This is a "tiled" layout, which automatically snaps objects into a grid. It's the best approach for beginners as it keeps things neat and organized. Continue dragging your worksheets - "KPI - Total Sales," "Sales by Region," and "Profit Trend" - until they are arranged on the canvas.
Tips for a User-Friendly Layout
Place Key Info Top-Left: People naturally read from top to bottom and left to right. Put your most important summary KPIs in the top-left corner.
Use Containers: Use Horizontal and Vertical layout containers (from the objects pane on the left) to group related items together neatly.
Give it Space: Don't cram everything together. Use "Blank" objects to add white space and improve readability.
Clean Titles: Double-click on the title of each view to edit it. Make them concise and clear. Remove anything redundant.
Step 4: Making Your Dashboard Interactive
A static dashboard is just an image. An interactive one is a tool for exploration. Adding interactivity lets your users answer their own follow-up questions.
Adding Global Filters
A common need is to filter the entire dashboard by a specific date range or category.
Select any one of the worksheets on your dashboard.
Click the small downward arrow on its top border and navigate to Filters > [The filter you want, e.g., Order Date]. If you didn't add a filter at the worksheet level, you can go back to that sheet, drag "Order Date" to the filters shelf, and then return to the dashboard.
The filter control will appear on your dashboard. You can click its dropdown menu to change its style (e.g., a slider or a list).
By default, it will only filter the worksheet it came from. To apply it to all worksheets, click its dropdown menu and select Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source.
Using a Chart as a Filter
This is one of Tableau's most intuitive features. Imagine you want to click on a region in your bar chart and have all the other charts update to show data only for that region.
Select the "Sales by Region" bar chart on your dashboard.
In the top-right corner of its border, you'll see several small icons. Click the one that looks like a funnel (its tooltip will say "Use as Filter").
That's it! Now, when a user clicks on the "East" bar, the KPI card and the profit trend line chart will instantly update to reflect data from only the East region.
Step 5: Publishing and Sharing Your Insights
Once your dashboard is complete, you need to share it. You can export a static version as an image or PDF, but to share its interactivity, you need to publish it. In Tableau Desktop, navigate to Server > Publish Workbook. This allows you to publish it to Tableau Cloud (formerly Tableau Online) or your company's internal Tableau Server, where stakeholders can access and interact with it via their web browser.
Final Thoughts
Following these steps, you've learned the essential workflow for a professional Tableau dashboard - moving from deliberate planning and data preparation to building insightful charts and arranging them into an interactive story. This process turns you from someone who just has data into someone who can deliver analysis and insights.
While mastering tools like Tableau is a powerful skill, its learning curve often involves hours of manual configuration. Our goal with Graphed is to help you skip straight to the insights. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources in seconds, and then we build real-time dashboards for you simply by asking in plain English. We turn hours of charting and dashboard design into a quick, 30-second conversation, automating the heavy lifting so you can get back to acting on your data.