What is a Story Point in Tableau?

Building a great dashboard in Tableau is one thing, but guiding your audience through the data to ensure they understand the key insights is another challenge entirely. This is where Tableau's Story feature comes in. This tutorial will walk you through exactly what a Tableau Story is, how story points work, and how you can use them to create compelling, data-driven narratives that your team or clients can understand and act on.

What Exactly is a Tableau Story (and a Story Point)?

Think of a Tableau Story as a guided presentation built directly within your Tableau workbook. It’s a sequence of individual worksheets and dashboards arranged in a specific order to tell a narrative. Instead of just presenting a massive, complex dashboard and letting users figure it out for themselves, a Story walks them through the data point by point, revealing insights step-by-step.

Each individual step in this narrative is called a Story Point. A story point is essentially a single slide in your presentation. Each point can contain an entire dashboard, a single worksheet, or even a slight variation of the previous point with a different filter applied or a specific data point highlighted. You chain these points together, adding text captions and annotations to explain what the audience is seeing and why it matters.

An easy analogy is to think of a Story as a final report or a book. Each Story Point is a page or a chapter in that book, with your captions acting as the narrator's voice guiding the reader through the plot.

Why Should You Use Tableau Stories?

At first glance, Stories might seem like a simple presentation tool, but they offer several powerful benefits for communicating data effectively.

They Create a Guided Analytical Path

Big, interactive dashboards can sometimes be overwhelming. Where should the user click first? What filter is the most important? A Story solves this by creating a controlled narrative. You decide what the audience sees first, second, and third. This ensures that they follow your train of thought and don't miss the key insights you worked so hard to uncover. You present your findings in a logical sequence, such as starting with a high-level business summary and progressively drilling down into the supporting details.

They Provide Critical Context

Data without context is just a collection of numbers. A chart might show a spike in sales, but it doesn't explain why it happened. Stories give you the dedicated space to add that crucial context. With each story point, you can use captions and annotations to explain what the visualization shows. For example, you can point an arrow to that sales spike and add a text box that says, "This increase was driven by our successful Black Friday marketing campaign." This transforms raw data into a meaningful and actionable insight for anyone, regardless of their data literacy.

They are Presentation-Ready (and Interactive)

How many times have you taken screenshots of your dashboards and pasted them into PowerPoint or Google Slides? This process is tedious, and the moment you do it, your visuals become static and outdated. Tableau Stories allow you to present directly from the source. Your data remains live and interactive. If a stakeholder asks a question during a meeting, you can click on the visualization within the story point, interact with it, filter it, and answer their question in real-time. It’s a far more dynamic and convincing way to present your data.

They Simplify Complex Information

The best way to explain a complex topic is to break it down into smaller, more digestible pieces. Tableau Stories are perfect for this. You can start with a broad overview on the first story point. On the second point, you can zoom in on a particular region or product category. On the third, you can show a trend over time for just that segment. This step-by-step approach prevents your audience from getting lost and helps them grasp complex relationships in the data much more easily.

How to Create a Story in Tableau: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating a compelling story is straightforward once you have your underlying visuals prepared. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Get Your Visualizations Ready

A good story needs good content. Before you even open the Story workspace, you need to build the worksheets and dashboards that will serve as your story points. Think about the narrative you want to tell and create the specific charts that support it. It's much easier to assemble a story when all the building blocks are already complete and named clearly.

For our example, let's imagine we have three visuals ready:

• A dashboard called "Overall Sales Performance"
• A bar chart worksheet called "Sales by Region"
• A line chart worksheet called "Monthly Sales Trend - West Region"

Step 2: Start a New Story

At the bottom of your Tableau workbook, next to the tabs for your worksheets and dashboards, you’ll see an icon that looks like a book. This is the "New Story" button. Click it. This will open a blank storyboard or canvas. This is where you will build your narrative.

Step 3: Add Your First Story Point

On the left-hand side, a "Story" pane will appear, listing all the existing sheets (worksheets and dashboards) in your workbook. To create your first story point, simply drag your first sheet onto the canvas. Let's drag our "Overall Sales Performance" dashboard onto the canvas. It will snap into place, creating your first point. You'll notice a navigator bar appear at the top. This is where each of your story points will be displayed as you add them.

Step 4: Add a Caption and Contextual Annotations

This is the most important step for telling a good story. Above the canvas, there’s a box that says "Add a caption...". Use this to describe what the audience should be looking at. For our first point, we'll type a caption like: "Overall, our sales have grown 12% in the last year, reaching $5.4M." You can also drag text objects directly onto the dashboard within the story point to add more specific commentary. For instance, in the Story pane on the left, you can click and drag the "Text" object right next to a specific KPI on your dashboard and add a note like, "Our Profit Margin hit a company record of 18%."

Step 5: Continue Building Your Narrative with More Story Points

Now, let's add the next part of our analysis. To create a new story point, you can:

• Click "Blank": This adds a new, empty story point in the navigator. You can then drag a sheet into it.
• Click "Duplicate": This is incredibly useful. It copies your current story point, including the dashboard and any annotations. You can then modify the view (e.g., apply a filter or highlight a new mark) to show a different slice of the data without starting over.

Let's click "Blank" to create our second point. Now, we drag the "Sales by Region" worksheet onto the new canvas. We'll add the caption: "The West region was the primary driver of growth, contributing to 45% of total sales." From here, you can even interact with the "Sales by Region" chart and highlight just the West region bar to make it stand out.

Let’s add a third point by duplicating the second. With the second point selected, click "Duplicate." Now we have an identical third point. In this duplicated point, let's imagine we filter the dashboard to drill down further. Let's add the caption: "Digging deeper into the West, Technology products significantly outperformed other categories." This creates a smooth flow from the general to the specific.

Step 6: Customize Your Story's Layout and Appearance

Tableau gives you options to customize how your story looks and feels. In the "Layout" pane on the left, you can adjust several settings:

• Navigator Style: By default, you see caption boxes. You can change this to "Numbers," "Dots," or "Arrows" for different presentation styles. Caption boxes are often the clearest because they show your descriptions directly.
• Show Title: Toggle the main story title on or off.
• Sizing: Adjust the size of the story canvas. You can set it to a fixed size or have it adapt automatically. "Fit to size" is often a good starting point.

Tips for Building an Effective Tableau Story

Following the technical steps will give you a story, but these best practices will help you create one that truly resonates with your audience.

• Know Your Main Message First: Before you drag a single sheet, decide on the main conclusion of your story. What is the one thing you want your audience to remember? Structure every story point to support that central message.
• Keep It Concise: Resist the temptation to include every single chart you've created. A great story is focused and uncluttered. If you have several distinct topics to discuss, consider creating separate, shorter stories for each one instead of one massive, confusing narrative.
• Annotations are Your Best Friend: Don't assume the data speaks for itself. Use text and highlighting to point at exactly what’s important in a view. Words turn graphics into guidance. Explain what the peaks and valleys mean. Answer the "so what?" behind every chart.
• Create a Logical Flow: Your story points should follow a natural progression. A common and effective structure is:
• Consider Your Audience: Who are you building this story for? An executive team likely needs a short, high-level story focusing on key performance indicators and strategic outcomes. A marketing team might need a more detailed, granular story that explores campaign performance and customer behavior. Tailor the language, charts, and level of detail accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Tableau Stories transform your data analysis from a static set of charts into a persuasive and dynamic narrative. By breaking down complex information into a series of clear story points, you can guide your audience's attention, provide critical context, and ensure your key insights are not only seen but truly understood. It's a fundamental skill for anyone looking to make a real impact with their data.

Of course, building the narrative in Tableau is often the fun part. The real challenge can be the tedious manual work that comes before: locating, connecting, and cleaning all your data sources in one place. We built Graphed to automate this entire process. With it, we connect directly to platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, Salesforce, and Facebook Ads, allowing you to instantly create dashboards and reports using only plain English. It's like having a data analyst on your team who works in seconds, so you can spend less time wrangling data and more time telling a compelling story with it.