How to Make a Tableau

Creating your first dashboard in Tableau can feel like a huge hurdle, but it's simpler than you think once you break it down. Instead of getting lost in all the features, this guide will walk you through a practical, step-by-step process. We’ll cover everything from connecting your data to building interactive charts and arranging them into a finished dashboard you can actually use.

First, What Exactly is a Tableau Dashboard?

Think of a Tableau dashboard as an interactive canvas where you can display multiple data visualizations at once. While a single visualization (called a "Worksheet" in Tableau) can show you one thing - like sales over time - a dashboard lets you combine several worksheets to tell a more complete story. For example, you could show sales over time, top-selling products, and regional performance all on a single screen.

The real power of a Tableau dashboard is its interactivity. You can click on one chart to filter and update all the others, allowing you or your team to slice and dice the data to uncover insights without having to build a dozen different reports.

Step 1: Plan Your Dashboard (Don't Skip This!)

Jumping straight into building charts is a common mistake that leads to confusing and cluttered dashboards. Taking a few minutes to plan will save you hours of frustration later. Before you even open Tableau, ask yourself three simple questions:

• Who is this for? Are you building this for your marketing team, the CEO, or yourself? The audience determines the level of detail. A CEO might want high-level KPIs, while a marketing manager needs granular campaign data.
• What questions should it answer? A good dashboard answers specific questions at a glance. Instead of a vague goal like "show sales data," define clear questions like, "Which product categories are driving the most revenue?" or "How is our sales performance trending this quarter compared to last?"
• What data do I need? Based on the questions, identify the data sources and specific metrics required. This could be transaction data from a CRM, web traffic from Google Analytics, or a simple sales spreadsheet. Make sure your data is clean and organized, with clear column headers.

Step 2: Connect Your Data Source

With your plan in place, it's time to open Tableau and connect to your data. Tableau supports a huge range of data connectors, from simple spreadsheets to complex databases.

For this tutorial, let’s assume you have an Excel or Google Sheets file with sales data containing columns like Order Date, Product Category, State, and Sales.

1. On the startup screen, look at the “Connect” pane on the left.
2. Select the appropriate connector. If you have a CSV or Excel file, choose “Microsoft Excel.” If it’s a Google Sheet, select “Google Sheets” and follow the prompts to sign in.
3. Navigate to your file and open it. Tableau will automatically bring you to the “Data Source” tab.

Here, you can review your data, make sure the data types (e.g., number, date, string) are correct for each column, and join it with other tables if needed. If it all looks good, click on the “Sheet 1” tab at the bottom-left to go to your first worksheet.

Step 3: Build Your Visualizations (Worksheets)

Dashboards are composed of individual worksheets. We’ll create three separate charts that answer different business questions. On the left side of the worksheet view, you’ll see your data fields split into Dimensions (qualitative data like 'Product Category' or 'State') and Measures (quantitative data like 'Sales' or 'Profit').

Worksheet 1: Sales by Product Category

This simple bar chart will show us which categories are our top performers.

• Drag the Sales measure onto the Columns shelf at the top. This will create a horizontal bar.
• Drag the Product Category dimension onto the Rows shelf.
• Tableau instantly creates a bar chart. To make it easier to read, click the “Sort” icon on the toolbar to arrange the bars from highest to lowest.
• Finally, double-click the "Sheet 1" tab and rename it to something descriptive, like “Sales by Category.”

Worksheet 2: Sales Trend Over Time

A line chart is perfect for showing trends. Let’s see how our sales perform month over month.

• Create a new worksheet by clicking the icon next to your first worksheet tab.
• Drag the Order Date dimension onto the Columns shelf. By default, Tableau will likely show it by YEAR. You can change this by right-clicking the blue “YEAR(Order Date)” pill and selecting Month (the second one, which shows a continuous trend).
• Drag the Sales measure onto the Rows shelf.
• Just like that, you have a line chart showing sales trends. Rename this worksheet to “Monthly Sales Trend.”

Worksheet 3: Sales by State Map

A map is a great way to visualize geographic data.

• Create another new worksheet.
• Find the State field in your Dimensions. If it has a globe icon next to it, Tableau has already identified it as geographic data. Double-click it.
• Tableau will add Longitude and Latitude to your shelves and create a map with a dot for each state in your data.
• To make this map more useful, drag the Sales measure onto the Color tile in the Marks card. States with higher sales will now appear in a darker shade.
• Rename this sheet to “Sales Map.”

Step 4: Assemble Your Dashboard

Now that you have your building blocks (the worksheets), it's time to put them together on a dashboard.

1. Create a new dashboard by clicking the icon at the bottom of the screen (the one with four squares).
2. On the left, you'll see a list of all your worksheets. The main area is a blank canvas.
3. Before you drag anything, you can set the size of your dashboard in the “Size” section on the left. Fixed size and a standard Desktop Browser layout is a good starting point.
4. Now, just drag and drop your worksheets onto the canvas. Start with the "Sales Map". It will take up the entire space.
5. Next, drag "Sales by Category” onto the canvas. As you move it around, you'll see grey areas appear. Dropping it on one of these areas will tile the chart next to, above, or below the existing one. Let's place it to the right of the map.
6. Drag the "Monthly Sales Trend" chart and drop it below the map and the bar chart.
7. Tableau automatically adds legends for the map. You can move these around or remove them by clicking the "X" if they aren’t needed.

Step 5: Add Interactivity

A static dashboard is fine, but an interactive one is far more powerful. The easiest way to add interactivity is to use one of your charts as a filter for the others.

• Select the Sales Map worksheet on your dashboard. You should see a grey border appear around it with a few icons.
• Click the filter icon (it looks like a small funnel).
• That’s it! Now, click on a state in the map (e.g., California). Watch how the “Sales by Category” and “Monthly Sales Trend” charts automatically update to show data for only California. Click the state again or click an empty part of the map to clear the filter.

This simple action transformed your dashboard from a static report into a dynamic analysis tool, allowing anyone to explore the data without needing to know any Tableau.

Step 6: Polish and Format

The final step is to clean up your dashboard so it's easy to understand and looks professional.

• Add a Title: On the left side under "Objects," drag a Text object to the very top of your dashboard. Type in a clear title like "Quarterly Sales Performance Dashboard.” You can format the font and size to make it stand out.
• Clean up Chart Titles: The worksheet titles might be redundant. You can right-click the title of any chart on the dashboard and choose Hide Title.
• Adjust Sizing: You likely need to resize your charts. Simply drag the borders between them to give more space to the most important visualizations.
• Add Context: Use another Text object to add a short sentence explaining what the dashboard shows or how to use the interactive filter. A small note like, "Click on a state to filter all charts," can be very helpful for new users.

Once you’re happy with the layout, go to “File” > “Save to Tableau Public” to share it online, or save it locally as a workbook file.

Final Thoughts

Building a dashboard in Tableau boils down to a clear process: plan your design, build individual worksheets, assemble them on a dashboard canvas, add interactivity, and polish the final product. While it involves a lot of manual steps and has a learning curve, mastering this workflow opens up a world of data-driven insights.

This process of connecting data, manually building charts, and arranging them is powerful, but it's also where most teams spend their time - time they could be spending on analysis. At Graphed, we’ve tackled this by teaching an AI to do the heavy lifting for you. Instead of dragging and dropping fields, you can just ask in plain English, "Show me a dashboard of monthly sales, top product categories, and a sales map by state," and get an interactive, real-time dashboard built in seconds - no worksheets or formatting required.