In the earlier chapters, we saw how to analyze our data by building visualizations and dashboards. Now, it is time for us to also focus on how to share our findings with others. This chapter focuses on how we can present our work to our end users. We will look at how to share ready insights with end users by creating storyboards and the different ways of saving and sharing our work with others.
When we build dashboards, we give our end users a holistic view of the data. However, to see what is really happening with the data, the users need to interact with the dashboard and uncover insights all by themselves. We can make this process a little easier for the end users by guiding them via some instructions on the dashboard; however, it is still an investigative approach. It can be time-consuming for the end users to first find the insights and then take action, so rather than making our users dig out the findings, it would be great if we could give them some readily consumable insights by placing data in an easy-to-understand manner.
Story points in Tableau help us achieve this objective by giving us a framework for walking the end users through series of data points that require attention. Very simply put, story points in Tableau helps us tell stories about our data while still being connected to the data, so when the data changes, our story updates...
In the first chapter, we briefly saw how to save our work in Tableau by saving My first Tableau Workbook with the .twb extension. This .twb file is a proprietary file format in Tableau, and the file saved with the .twb extension is referred to as a Tableau workbook.
This .twb file is an XML document that contains information regarding the sheets, dashboards, and so on that we have created in Tableau. The .twb file is an interactive file that contains only the metadata information about our data and not the actual data, because of which it is constantly referencing a datasource. What this means is that, if we wish to share our work with our end users in a .twb format, then we need to make sure that they have the access to the data that the .twb file is referencing. If they don't they will not be able to use the workbook and this process will require our end users to have a Tableau Desktop installed on their machines to access our workbook. Because of...
When we share a packaged workbook with our end users, they will need to have the Tableau Reader to use and interact with it. Just as we need a PDF reader to open a PDF file, similarly, we will need a Tableau Reader to open a Tableau packaged workbook. In the previous recipe, we learned that when we save the file as a packaged workbook, it also packages a copy of the data. This copy of the data is actually a static snapshot of the data at a particular point in time. So, every time our end users need the dashboards with the updated data, we will have to open the file in Tableau Desktop, refresh the data and re-save the file as a packaged workbook, and then share it via e-mail, shared drives, and so on. This solution becomes cumbersome, but it's fine for one of, ad-hoc analysis. However, imagine doing this for workbooks that are going to be used every day or every hour. In these situations, this kind of manual intervention to update our...
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