How to Create Reports in Tableau
Creating your first report in a tool as powerful as Tableau can feel like you're about to climb a mountain. But getting started is much more straightforward than it seems. The entire process boils down to connecting your data, telling Tableau how you want to see it, and arranging those visuals to tell a clear story. This guide will walk you through building a clean, interactive report, step-by-step, using practical examples you can apply to your own data.
A Report Is Only as Good as Its Data: Connecting Your Source
Before you build anything, you need to give Tableau the raw materials. Connecting to a data source is always the first step. Tableau can connect to hundreds of sources, from simple spreadsheets to massive cloud databases.
When you first open Tableau Desktop, you’ll be greeted with the "Connect" pane on the left. This is your starting point. You'll see common options like:
Tableau Server: For connecting to data already published within your organization's Tableau environment.
To a File: This is where most beginners start. You can connect to Microsoft Excel files, CSVs, text files, PDFs, and more.
To a Server: This is for more advanced connections to databases like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and many others.
Connecting to a Simple Excel File
Let's walk through the most common scenario: connecting to a simple business spreadsheet. Imagine you have an Excel file with your recent sales data, including columns for Order Date, Product Category, Region, Sales, and Profit.
Under the "To a File" section, click on Microsoft Excel.
A file browser window will open. Navigate to your sales data file and click Open.
Tableau will now take you to the Data Source page. This is your staging area. On the left, you'll see the sheets within your Excel file. Drag the sheet containing your sales data into the main canvas area that says, "Drag tables here."
Tableau will then display a preview of your data in a grid at the bottom. This is a great chance to review your columns and make sure everything looks correct. You can change data types (e.g., from a Number to a Date), rename fields, or even join it with data from another table right from this screen. For now, though, we'll assume the data is good to go.
Navigating Your Tableau Canvas
With your data connected, click on the "Sheet 1" tab at the bottom left of the screen. This is the worksheet, and it's where you'll build your individual charts and graphs (which Tableau calls "views" or "vizzes"). The worksheet might look complex at first, but it’s organized into a few key areas.
The Data Pane
On the left-hand side, you’ll see the Data pane. Tableau has automatically read the columns from your spreadsheet and sorted them into two important categories:
Dimensions (Blue): These are your categorical, qualitative fields. They are the "what," "where," and "when" of your data. Think of things like Product Category, Customer Name, or Region. Dimensions are what you use to slice and dice your data.
Measures (Green): These are your numerical, quantitative fields that you can perform mathematical operations on. They are the "how much" or "how many." Examples include Sales, Profit, Quantity, and Website Sessions. Tableau will almost always aggregate measures (e.g., SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX).
Remembering "blue for dimensions" and "green for measures" is a simple but powerful way to understand how Tableau sees your data.
Shelves and Cards
At the top and middle section of the worksheet, you'll find a set of 'shelves' and 'cards'. This is where you will drag and drop fields from your data pane to build your visualization.
Columns Shelf: Fields placed here create the columns in your view. Typically, this forms the x-axis of a chart.
Rows Shelf: Fields placed here create the rows. This typically forms the y-axis.
Marks Card: This card is where you control the visual properties of your chart. It contains sub-shelves for Color, Size, Label, Detail, and Tooltip. Want to color your chart segments by region? Drag the Region field to 'Color'. Want to make the size of a bubble chart correspond to profit? Drag Profit to 'Size'.
Filters Shelf: Need to limit the data shown in your view? Drag a field here to create a filter, allowing you to include or exclude specific values (e.g., showing data for only one year).
Step-by-Step: Building Your First Report Visualization
Theory is great, but let's put it into practice. We’ll use our connected sales data to create a simple bar chart that analyzes performance across product categories.
Step 1: Create a Basic Bar Chart
Our goal is to see which product categories generate the most sales. This means we need the Product Category dimension and the Sales measure.
From the Data pane, drag the Sales measure onto the Rows shelf. You'll see a single vertical bar appear, representing the total sum of all sales in your dataset.
Next, drag the Product Category dimension onto the Columns shelf.
Instantly, Tableau transforms the view into a bar chart. It has automatically broken down the total sales by each product category available in your data. In just two drag-and-drop actions, you've created your first meaningful visualization.
Step 2: Adding Color and Detail for Deeper Insight
A simple bar chart is useful, but we can make it richer with more context. Let’s say we want to understand which regions contribute to the sales within each product category.
Find the Region dimension in the Data pane.
Drag Region directly onto the Color shelf in the Marks card.
Tableau instantly breaks each bar into colored segments, one for each region, and adds a color legend on the right. You've just created a stacked bar chart. Now, you can not only see the total sales for "Technology" but also see how much of that total came from the Central, East, West, and South regions.
Now, let's add one more layer. It’s helpful to know not just the sales, but also the profit associated with each segment. This is a perfect use for a tooltip.
Drag the Profit measure from the Data pane onto the Tooltip shelf in the Marks card.
It might seem like nothing has happened, but now when you hover your mouse over any of a bar's colored segments, the pop-up box (the tooltip) will show you the Product Category, Region, Sales, and the SUM of Profit for that specific segment.
Step 3: Filtering Your Data
What if you only want to see this report for orders placed last year? This is where filters are essential.
Drag the Order Date dimension from the Data pane to the Filters shelf.
A "Filter Field" dialog box will appear, asking how you want to filter the date. For this example, choose "Relative date" and click Next.
In the next screen, you can set the filter to something dynamic. Click the radio button for "Previous year."
Click OK.
Your entire view will update to show only the data for the last full year. You can filter by any field in your data set, allowing you to focus your report on the exact information that matters.
From Single Chart to Interactive Dashboard
A single worksheet is powerful, but a report often requires multiple visualizations to work together. A Tableau dashboard is a collection of several worksheets and objects on a single canvas, allowing you to tell a broader story.
Creating and Sizing Your Dashboard
At the very bottom of the Tableau window, next to your "Sheet 1" tab, there is a small icon for "New Dashboard". Click it.
This opens a blank Dashboard canvas. On the left, instead of the Data pane, you'll see a list of the sheets you've built. The first thing you should consider is the size of your dashboard. In the "Dashboard" pane on the left, you can set the size. A good practice is to use "Fixed size" and select a common dimension like "Desktop Browser (1000 x 800)" to ensure your viewers see the report exactly as you designed it.
Adding Worksheets and Making It Interactive
Let's say in addition to our bar chart (Sheet 1), you've also created a line chart showing sales over time (Sheet 2). Building a dashboard is as simple as dragging these sheets from the left pane and dropping them onto your canvas.
Drag Sheet 1 (your bar chart) onto the canvas.
Drag Sheet 2 (your line chart) onto the canvas either below or next to the bar chart. Tableau gives you tiling options to automatically arrange them.
Here’s where the best part of Tableau comes in: interactivity. You can make it so that clicking on a part of one chart filters another chart.
Select the bar chart container on your dashboard (a gray border will appear around it).
In the top corner of the selected container, click the small funnel icon that says "Use as Filter".
That's it. Now, go to your dashboard and click on the "Technology" bar. You’ll see the sales-over-time line chart instantly update to show the trend for only technology products. Click it again to de-select. This one simple feature transforms your report from a static image into an exploratory tool. It allows your audience to ask and answer their own questions, which is the hallmark of excellent business intelligence.
You've now successfully connected to data, built a detailed chart on a worksheet, and combined it with other visuals into a fully interactive dashboard. Building reports in Tableau is a process of starting simple with a basic visualization and then iteratively adding layers of complexity - like colors, filters, and dashboard actions - to reveal deeper insights.
While Tableau offers incredible depth for data analysis, getting to those insights can sometimes feel gated by its technical learning curve. Not everyone has the time to become a BI expert. At Graphed, we’ve focused on simplifying this process. We let you skip the manual drag-and-drop entirely by allowing you to create reports using just plain English. Simply describe what you want to see - "Show me a dashboard of sales vs. profit by region for last quarter" - and Graphed builds interactive, real-time reports and dashboards for you in seconds.