Tableau Data Storytelling: Rebuilding a Cluttered Dashboard

Data Science Innovators Conference 2023From Numbers to Narrative: Crafting Compelling Stories with TableauWatch the full session · 1 hr

In a workshop at the Data Science Innovators Conference 2023, Selma Dogic, senior manager of the analytics center of excellence at Carter's, showed attendees how to turn a crowded public dashboard into a clear data story in Tableau. In "From Numbers to Narrative: Crafting Compelling Stories with Tableau," she rebuilt a Makeover Monday challenge on hate crimes in Chicago from 2012 to 2023, and shared design rules she applies to business dashboards.

Why did Dogic choose Tableau and Makeover Monday?

Dogic said she chose Tableau because it is an industry leader with a free public version, a strong community geared toward self-learners, and skills that transfer to other BI tools. She leads the analytics center of enablement at Carter's, where her team supports self-service reporting for business users and builds in-house machine learning models. In her framing, Tableau is the decision-insights front end for those models.

Makeover Monday is a weekly Tableau community challenge that takes an existing visualization, releases its data and asks participants to improve it. Dogic used week 14 of 2023, on hate crimes in Chicago. She recommended such challenges as a way to build a portfolio, since the results can be published on Tableau Public and GitHub.

What was wrong with the original dashboard?

Dogic asked attendees for reactions. The original was small at default size, text-heavy and dense. She said she was overwhelmed the first time and never made it past the top. An attendee said it felt too busy and that the key point should stand out. That became the goal: pull out a few key insights and deliver them concisely.

How did she build the story in Tableau?

Dogic worked from an Excel file. Her habit for newcomers is to double-click fields and see what happens. She changed the date field from a string to a date, which revealed data from 2012 to 2023 with one null, and excluded the null.

She used Show Me recommendations, then built a bar chart of total victims colored by percent change, so the bar height showed the total while color and labels showed change. She explained the choice: a chart of changes alone could suggest the problem was shrinking in years when it was merely growing more slowly.

Next she grouped many motivation categories into groups such as race and ethnicity and sexual orientation, filtered out groups with little or inconsistent data, and built a bubble view where circle size showed the change by motivation over time. A third sheet showed each motivation as a percent of total. She applied the filter across the workbook so comparisons stayed consistent.

Dogic said she does light cleanup in Tableau but moves heavier wrangling elsewhere. When a project joins many tables or sources, or the data format has to change, she said she would use another tool upstream, such as Tableau Prep, R or Python.

What dashboard design practices did she recommend?

Dogic used the analogy that sheets are pages and dashboards are chapters. Key practices she covered:

• Order for the reader. Readers scan in a Z pattern, so put the aggregate view at the top and more detail lower.
• Title and clean up. Add a clear title, hide redundant sheet titles, axes and gridlines, and remove distractions.
• Place filters sensibly. Global filters go at the top or, increasingly, on the left in a web-style layout. Local filters sit near the chart they affect.
• Choose color with meaning. She used red for growth in hate crimes and gray and black otherwise, avoiding cheerful colors for a serious topic.
• Add provenance. Include the data source, a clickable byline for questions and a last-refreshed timestamp.
• Write the insight. Because users increasingly want answers rather than drill-down, she added text such as the 77 percent rise between 2021 and 2022 and the 64.7 percent share of race and ethnicity motivated incidents. Tooltips can carry narration too.

What did she say about clients who want tables?

Asked about clients who want old-fashioned reports, Dogic said most of her users just want tables. Her approach is to give them what they asked for, then add trends and insights above it and recommend best practices. She also warned against building complexity for its own sake: "Don't build something for the sake of just building it."

Where to find more practical sessions

AI Connect continues to host hands-on and practitioner sessions. The 2027 schedule includes 24 free live webinars in four series: the AI x Enterprise Panel Series, AI Demo Days, Agentic AI Showcases and the Plug & Play Series. Details are at /webinars/, and registration for 2027 events is coming soon.

Frequently asked questions

What is Makeover Monday?

Dogic described it as a weekly Tableau community challenge that releases the data behind an existing visualization and asks participants to improve it.

Where should dashboard filters go in Tableau?

Dogic said global filters usually go at the top, or increasingly on the left in a web-style layout, while local filters should sit near the chart they affect.

When should you do data wrangling outside Tableau?

She said joining many tables or sources, or needing to change the data format, are signs to use another tool upstream, such as Tableau Prep, R or Python.

How do you build a portfolio with Tableau?

Dogic recommended taking on weekly challenges like Makeover Monday and publishing the results to Tableau Public and GitHub.

This article is based on remarks by Selma Dogic, Sr. Manager, Analytics COE, Carter's at Data Science Innovators Conference 2023 on April 12, 2023. More coverage: More AI Connect Events.

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