How to Create a Monthly Report in Tableau
Creating a monthly report in Tableau can feel like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. Once you have a clear process, you can build a powerful, automated dashboard that provides key insights month after month. This guide will walk you through a structured approach, from planning your report to building the final visualizations and setting them up for easy updates.
Start with a Plan: Defining Your Monthly Report's Purpose
Before you even open Tableau, the most important step is to think about the story you want to tell with your data. A good report answers specific questions and is tailored to its audience. Jumping straight into building charts without a plan is the fastest way to create a confusing dashboard that no one uses.
Ask yourself these four questions:
Who is the audience? Are you building this report for senior executives, your marketing team, or a client? An executive might only need high-level KPIs, while your team might need more granular data to analyze campaign performance.
What is the report's main goal? Is it to track sales performance against targets? To monitor website engagement? To justify marketing spend? A clear goal helps you focus on the most important metrics.
What are the critical KPIs? Based on the goal, list the key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to feature. For a monthly sales report, this might be Total Revenue, Number of Deals, Average Deal Size, and Conversion Rate. For marketing, you might track Website Sessions, New Leads, Cost Per Lead, and MQLs.
How do you want to compare data? Monthly reports are all about trends and comparisons. Decide if you want to show month-over-month (MoM) growth, compare performance to the same month last year (YoY), or track progress against specific goals.
Example Monthly Report Plan
Let's imagine we're creating a monthly sales report for a small business. Our plan might look like this:
Audience: The founder and head of sales.
Goal: To provide a clear overview of monthly sales performance and identify top-performing products and regions.
KPIs: Total Sales, MoM Sales Growth %, Sales by Product Category, Sales by Region.
Structure: A main dashboard with KPI scorecards at the top, a trendline for monthly sales, and bar charts for category/region breakdowns.
Getting Your Data Ready
Tableau is powerful, but it works best with clean, well-structured data. Your monthly reporting process will be much smoother if your data is tidy from the start. Most often, you'll be connecting to a data source like an Excel file, a Google Sheet, a CSV, or a database.
Before connecting, check your data for a few common issues:
Consistent Date Format: Make sure your date column is formatted consistently (e.g., MM/DD/YYYY). Inconsistent dates will cause errors when you try to analyze trends.
No Merged Cells: If you're using a spreadsheet, unmerge any cells. Merged cells can confuse Tableau's data interpreter.
Clear Column Headers: Use simple, descriptive names for your columns (e.g., 'Order Date', 'Sales Revenue', 'Product Category'). Avoid special characters.
Tidy Data Structure: Ideally, each row should represent a single record (like one sale), and each column should represent a distinct field (like the date, customer, product, or sales amount).
Taking a few minutes to clean your source file will save you hours of frustration inside Tableau.
Connecting Your Data Source to Tableau
With your plan and data ready, it’s time to launch Tableau Desktop. Connecting your data is the first step in the application.
On the start screen, look at the Connect pane on the left.
Select the type of file or server you want to connect to. For this example, let's choose Microsoft Excel.
Navigate to your saved data file and click Open.
Tableau will now open the Data Source screen. Here, you'll see a list of the sheets from your Excel workbook on the left. Drag the sheet containing your sales data onto the canvas in the main window. Tableau will show you a preview of your data, allowing you to check data types (e.g., ensuring a Date field is recognized as a date, not a string). Once it looks good, click on the "Sheet 1" tab at the bottom to go to your first worksheet.
Building Your Key Visualizations (Worksheets)
In Tableau, you build individual charts on worksheets and then combine them into a single view on a dashboard. Let's create the visuals from our report plan.
1. KPI Scorecards: The Big Numbers
Scorecards show your main KPIs in a large, easy-to-read format. We'll start by creating a calculated field to isolate sales from the most recent month in your dataset.
Create a 'Current Month Sales' Calculated Field:
Right-click in the Data pane on the left and select Create Calculated Field.
Name the field "Current Month Sales".
Enter the following formula. This formula checks if an order date falls within the same month and year as the most recent date in your entire dataset.
IF DATETRUNC('month', [Order Date]) = DATETRUNC('month', {MAX([Order Date])}) THEN [Sales] END
Click OK.
Now, let's build the scorecard:
Drag the newly created Current Month Sales field onto the Text mark on the Marks card.
Right-click the newly created worksheet tab at the bottom and name it "Monthly Sales KPI".
To make the number larger, click on the Text mark, then on the three dots (...) button. In the editor, increase the font size and make it bold.
You can repeat this process to create KPIs for other metrics, like Profit or Quantity. You can also create a calculated field for "Previous Month Sales" and another to calculate the "MoM % Change" for comparison.
2. Month-over-Month Trend Line Chart
A line chart is perfect for showing performance over time. This worksheet will show how your sales have trended over the past several months.
Create a new worksheet and name it "MoM Sales Trend".
Drag your date field (e.g., Order Date) onto the Columns shelf. Right-click the pill and make sure it is set to Month (the continuous green option, usually shown as "Month, YYYY").
Drag your primary metric (e.g., Sales) onto the Rows shelf.
Tableau will automatically create a line chart. You can add a filter for the date to show only the last 6 or 12 months for a cleaner view.
For extra context, drag Sales onto the Label mark to show the sales total for each month directly on the chart.
3. Performance by Category Bar Chart
Bar charts are great for comparing performance across different segments, like product categories or regions.
Create a new worksheet and name it "Sales by Category".
Drag a categorical dimension like Product Category onto the Columns shelf.
Drag your metric, Sales, onto the Rows shelf.
Tableau will create an automatic bar chart. To sort it, click the sort icon on the axis or in the toolbar. Sorting from highest to lowest makes it easy to spot your top performers.
Drag the Sales field onto the Label mark to display the total sales for each category on its bar.
Assembling Your Dashboard
Now that your individual worksheets are built, it's time to bring them together into a professional-looking dashboard.
Click the New Dashboard icon at the bottom of the screen (the one with four squares).
On the Dashboard pane on the left, you'll see a list of your worksheets.
Drag and drop your worksheets onto the dashboard canvas. A good layout is to place the KPI scorecards at the top in a horizontal container, followed by the trend line chart and bar charts below.
Use the Size settings in the left pane to adjust the dashboard dimensions. A fixed size like "Desktop Browser" is often a good place to start.
Add a title to your dashboard by dragging a Text object to the top.
Making Your Dashboard Interactive
One of the best features of Tableau is interactivity. You can add filters that apply to multiple charts at once.
Select one of your worksheets on the dashboard (e.g., the trend chart).
Click the small dropdown arrow on its top border and select Filters, then choose the filter you want to add (e.g., a date filter).
The filter will appear on the right side of the dashboard. Click its dropdown menu and select Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source.
Now, when an end-user changes the filter, every relevant chart on your dashboard will update automatically, allowing them to explore the data.
Refreshing and Sharing Your Report Monthly
The whole point of a monthly report is to be able to update it easily. How you do this depends on where your data lives and whether you have Tableau Server or Online.
For Live Connections: If you connected to a live database, your dashboard will update automatically whenever someone opens it. Just open the report and the latest data will be there.
For Extracts (Excel, CSVs, etc.): If you use a data extract, you'll need to refresh it. In Tableau Desktop, you can go to Data > [Your Data Source] > Refresh. This will pull in any new data from your source file.
Automation with Tableau Server/Online: The most efficient way is to publish your dashboard to Tableau Server or Tableau Online. When you publish, you can set a refresh schedule (e.g., "refresh daily at 7 AM"). This automatically updates your dashboard with the latest data, so your report is always ready and waiting for your team.
Final Thoughts
Building a valuable monthly report in Tableau follows a clear plan: plan your goals, prep your data, build focused visualizations, and assemble them into an interactive dashboard. By setting up calculations for monthly comparisons and using filters effectively, you can create a single report that serves you well time and time again without rebuilding it from scratch.
Of course, there is a learning curve to tools like Tableau. We built Graphed to remove the tedious parts of reporting - the hours spent on data prep, building charts manually, and learning complex formulas. Instead of building calculated fields and dragging pills, you can connect your data sources (like Google Ads, Shopify, and Salesforce) and simply ask for what you need in plain English, like "Show me a monthly report of sales performance vs. last month." Our platform builds the live, interactive dashboard for you in seconds, saving you time for what really matters: acting on the insights.