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Tableau Public Tutorial: Your First Chart and Dashboard

Lesson 2 of 2About 15 minutesBeginnerTableau Public for Beginners

Updated · By Robert Breen

The problem

Your VP wants weekly revenue by region in front of them by 9am Monday, and wants to filter to a single product line without emailing you. You have a CSV export and no budget for software.

What you’ll be able to do

In about 15 minutes you will have a bar chart of revenue by region, a product filter the viewer controls and a one-page dashboard, published with the free Tableau Public, plus a plan for keeping it current each week.

Before you start

Use Tableau Desktop Public Edition, Tableau’s free desktop app for Windows and Mac, and create a free Tableau Public account for publishing. (Tableau also offers a separate free download, Tableau Desktop Free Edition, which cannot publish to Tableau Public, so make sure you install the Public Edition.)

Two rules from Tableau’s own help pages shape this lesson. Anything you publish to Tableau Public can be seen by anyone, and the Public Edition is not licensed for commercial work. So practice with sample data: a CSV with the columns from Dimensions vs measures (Order date, Region, Store ID, Product, Units, Revenue) is plenty.

Steps

  1. Open Tableau Desktop Public Edition. On the start page, under Connect, click Text file and choose your CSV. Tableau opens the Data Source page with a preview of the rows.
  2. Check the column types in the preview: Order date should show a calendar icon, and Revenue and Units should show #. Change any that are wrong with the small type icon above the column.
  3. Click the Sheet 1 tab at the bottom. On the left, the Data pane lists your dimensions above your measures.
  4. Drag Region to Columns and Revenue to Rows. You get one bar per region showing SUM(Revenue). Region is a blue (discrete) pill, so it makes headers; Revenue is green (continuous), so it makes an axis.
  5. Drag Product to the Filters card, keep all values checked and click OK. Then right-click the Product field on the Filters card and choose Show Filter so viewers can use it.
  6. Rename the sheet (double-click the tab) to "Revenue by region".
  7. Click the New Dashboard button at the bottom of the workbook (or use the Dashboard menu). Drag "Revenue by region" from the Sheets list onto the canvas. The product filter comes with it.
  8. To publish, choose Server > Tableau Public > Save to Tableau Public, sign in (or create your free account from the sign-in box), name the workbook and save. Tableau Public only accepts extracted data, so if you see a connection error, go back to the Data Source page, switch the connection from Live to Extract and save again. You get a link to share.

Check your work

With the four sample rows, East should show $313 and West $269. If you see one bar with a single total, Region landed on Rows or Filters instead of Columns. If the bars are far too tall, Store ID or a total row may be getting summed, so revisit the dimension and measure split. If Store ID is listed with the measures, right-click it in the Data pane and choose Convert to Dimension.

Keeping it current every Monday

Tableau Public refreshes Google Sheets data sources automatically about every 24 hours, but not CSV or Excel files. If your weekly export can land in a Google Sheet, connect to the sheet instead of the CSV and the dashboard keeps itself up to date. Otherwise, replace the CSV each week and save to Tableau Public again under the same name.

Two limits worth knowing: a Tableau Public workbook can hold up to 15 million rows, and saving over a workbook with the same name replaces it on your profile (its view count starts again from zero).

Where to go next

Add a second sheet with Order date (as a continuous week) on Columns and Revenue on Rows for a weekly trend, and put it on the same dashboard. Then right-click the Product filter on the Filters card and choose Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source, so one product filter controls both charts.

Check your understanding

To get one bar per region, Region goes on…

Show the answer

Columns. A dimension on Columns (or Rows) creates one header and one bar per value.

Where is the command that publishes your workbook to Tableau Public?

Show the answer

Server > Tableau Public > Save to Tableau Public. In Tableau Desktop Public Edition, publishing lives under the Server menu. Remember that anything published there is public, so use sample data.

You want one Product filter to control two charts. What do you set?

Show the answer

Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source. Applying the filter to every worksheet that uses the data source makes it shared.

Sources

Checked against these official help pages on . Menus change, so if a button has moved, the help page has the current wording.

Terms in this lesson

DashboardData sourceData visualizationDimensionDrill-downFilter

Questions this lesson answers