How to Create a Quarterly Report in Tableau with AI

The end of a quarter often means one thing for many teams: it's time to build the quarterly report. This process can feel like a mad dash to pull numbers from a dozen different platforms, wrangle them in a spreadsheet, and hope the charts tell a clear story. But what if your reporting tool could do more than just display data? What if it could help you understand it? This is exactly where we'll focus, showing you how to build a robust quarterly report in Tableau and use its built-in AI features to find insights a lot faster.

What Goes Into a Great Quarterly Report?

Before jumping into Tableau, it's essential to remember what makes a quarterly report valuable. It's not just a data dump of everything that happened over the last 90 days. A great report tells a story about your performance, highlighting wins, explaining setbacks, and setting a clear direction for the next quarter. It needs to provide context and drive action.

While the specifics will vary by department, most effective quarterly reports contain a few key elements:

Executive Summary: A high-level overview of the quarter's key takeaways. What are the one or two most important things someone should know, even if they don't read the rest of the report?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Track your core metrics against goals and previous periods (Quarter-over-Quarter and Year-over-Year). These could include revenue, profit margin, customer acquisition cost (CAC), website conversion rate, or monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Showcasing both the result and the target is key here.
Financial Performance: A breakdown of revenue, expenses, and profitability. For marketing and sales teams, this often focuses on budget-versus-actual spend and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Deep-Dive Analysis: Go beyond the "what" and explore the "why." This is where you might analyze which marketing channels drove the most valuable customers, which sales reps closed the most deals, or which products were top performers.
Key Accomplishments & Challenges: Briefly list your biggest wins and the obstacles you faced. This humanizes the data and provides important qualitative context.
Goals for the Next Quarter: Based on the data, what are your strategic priorities moving forward? A good report should serve as a foundation for planning.

Setting Up Your Quarterly Report in Tableau: The Foundation

First, let's build the basic framework of our report. The goal is to create a series of clear, focused visuals that can later be assembled into a single, interactive dashboard.

Step 1: Connect to Your Data

Tableau can connect to almost any data source you can think of. For a typical quarterly business report, you'll likely pull data from:

Spreadsheets: Excel or Google Sheets are common for manual data tracking or combining data from different sources.
Databases: Connecting directly to a SQL database like PostgreSQL, MySQL, or a data warehouse like BigQuery or Snowflake gives you live access to raw data.
SaaS Platforms: Using connectors for tools like Salesforce, Google Analytics, or HubSpot allows you to pull your performance data directly into Tableau.

To start, open Tableau and choose the appropriate connector under the "Connect" pane. Once you've connected, Tableau will bring you to the Data Source page where you can preview your data, join different tables together, and make sure your data types (like dates, numbers, and strings) are correctly identified. A clean foundation here will save you headaches later.

Step 2: Create Your Key Worksheets

A "worksheet" in Tableau is a single chart or visual. The best dashboards are made of several simple, individual worksheets. Let's create a few essential charts for a sales and marketing quarterly report.

Chart 1: KPI Scorecards

These big-number callouts are perfect for your top-line metrics. Drag Measure Names to the Filters card and select a few key metrics like Sales, Leads, and New Customers. Then drag Measure Names to columns and Measure Values to the Text marks card. This gives you a clean list of your most important KPIs as text.

Chart 2: Quarter-over-Quarter Revenue Trend

Understanding trends is critical. Create a dual-axis line chart to compare performance across the last two quarters.

Drag your Order Date field to Columns (ensure it's set to Continuous Month).
Drag your Sales field to Rows.
Create a calculated field called "Previous Quarter Sales" using a formula like:
This LOOKUP function is powerful for period-over-period comparisons.
Drag this new calculated field to Rows as well. Right-click it and select "Dual Axis" to overlay the lines. You can now visually compare this quarter's trend to last quarter's.

Chart 3: Performance vs. Target with a Bullet Chart

A bullet chart is a fantastic way to visualize how actual performance stacks up against a specific goal. Tableau has a "Show Me" template for this.

Bring a dimension like Product Category to Rows and your actual metric, like Sales, to Columns.
From the Analytics Pane, drag a Reference Line onto the worksheet to represent your target. You can set this from a constant value or another measure field in your data.

This simple visual instantly shows you which categories are over-performing and which are falling short.

Step 3: Assemble Your Dashboard

With a few worksheets created, it's time to bring them together. Create a new dashboard and simply drag your completed worksheets from the left-hand pane onto the canvas. Arrange them logically—scorecards at the top, trends in the middle, and detailed breakdowns at the bottom.

The magic of a Tableau dashboard is interactivity. To enable this, select one of your worksheets on the dashboard and click the small funnel icon that appears, which "Use as Filter." Now, when you click on a product category in your bullet chart, all other charts on the dashboard will filter to show data just for that category.

Powering Up Your Tableau Report with AI

Building the visuals is only half the battle. The real value comes from interpreting them—and this is where Tableau's AI features can be a game-changer. These tools are designed to work like a junior data analyst by your side, helping you find the "why" hidden behind the "what."

Uncover 'Why' with Explain Data

Have you ever looked at a chart and seen a sudden, unexpected spike or dip in performance and wondered what caused it? Explain Data is built for exactly that moment.

In your dashboard, find an interesting data point—for example, a sales bar for a single month that's much higher than usual. Click it, then click the nearby lightbulb icon that appears for Explain Data. Tableau's AI will automatically analyze your entire dataset to find statistically significant drivers behind that outlier. It might suggest things like, "This month's sales increase was driven by an unusually large order from a single new customer, combined with higher-than-average performance in the West region." It takes just seconds to get explanations that would otherwise require you to build several more drill-down charts manually.

Chat with Your Data Using Natural Language

Tableau’s natural language capabilities (formerly known as Ask Data) let you ask questions of your data in plain English. Instead of dragging and dropping fields, you can just type a question like, "Show me monthly sales growth as a percent of total" or "what were the top 5 products by profit in Q3?" Tableau interprets your request and instantly creates the corresponding visualization. This works best for quick, ad-hoc questions that come up during a meeting, saving you from having to pause and manually build a new worksheet.

Look Into the Future with One-Click Forecasting

Setting realistic goals for the next quarter requires a solid baseline. Tableau’s forecasting tools use statistical models to project future trends based on your historical data.

In a worksheet showing a metric over time (like a line chart of monthly website traffic), just head to the Analytics pane, drag "Forecast" onto your chart, and drop it. That’s it. Tableau will generate a forecast along with upper and lower confidence bands. You can now use a data-driven projection to inform your Q4 goal-setting instead of just guessing.

Your Generative AI Assistant: Einstein Copilot

The newest and most powerful addition is Einstein Copilot. Integrated directly within Tableau, it acts as a conversational AI assistant that helps you throughout the analytics process. You can give it prompts in plain English, and it can perform a range of tasks:

Automate Calculations: Struggling with a formula? Ask the Copilot: "Create a calculated field to show profit margin" and it will write the Level-of-Detail expression for you.
Build Visualizations: Describe what you want to see. For example, "Create a bar chart showing year-over-year sales growth by region." It will automatically build the worksheet for you.
Interpret Visualizations: You can even ask it to summarize a dashboard for you, which is incredibly useful for generating the text for your Executive Summary section.

Best Practices for an Actionable Quarterly Report

As you finish your report, remember these final tips to ensure it drives real business conversations.

Focus on a Few Key Themes: Your report is more powerful when it focuses on 2-3 main stories from the quarter rather than trying to summarize everything. Let the visuals support these core themes.
Use Annotations and Titles to Guide Viewers: Don't make your audience guess what a chart means. Use dashboard titles like "Ad spend continues to deliver high ROI, though channel mix is shifting" and annotate key points directly on your charts.
Check Your Granularity: For a high-level review, looking at weekly or monthly trends is often better than daily data, which can be noisy and distracting. Use your time filters to set the right level of detail.
Provide Recommendations: A report shows what happened. A great report recommends what to do next. End each section with a clear "So what?" and recommended actions for the quarter ahead.

Final Thoughts

Building an effective quarterly report in Tableau moves your analytics from static charts to a dynamic and interactive story. By connecting all your data and combining thoughtfully designed visuals with Tableau's built-in AI features, you can spend less time wrangling data and more time uncovering insights that actually drive decisions.

While mastering a powerful tool like Tableau is an incredibly valuable skill, it also requires a significant time investment just to get started. At Graphed, we felt this pain ourselves, which is why we built a tool that skips the complex setup. We make it easy to connect your marketing and sales data sources in just a few clicks. From there, you can ask for reports and dashboards in plain English and get live, interactive visualizations back in seconds, not hours.