Tableau: How to Build a High Quality Sales KPI Dashboard in Tableau Desktop
How do you build a high quality sales kpi dashboard in tableau in this session I’m going to show you how to build this exact dashboard follow along and let’s go to a new sheet
Let’s start by adding a new sheet first we’re going to build our big numbers so I have total sales total quantity big numbers in my dashboard let’s name this sheet total sales
Throughout the sales field onto text let’s make this really bigMake it 24 point
And make it blue and bold
Okay
Let’s set the formatting to be thousands let’s click on the drop down on some of the sales click format change the numbers to display units of thousands we only want to show 2020. So let’s grab order date put it on filters and keep only 20 20. 2020 sales was 609 000 ish let’s duplicate that and change it to quantity call this total quantity
Replace sales with quantity
And we’re going to leave it like that now I have a sales and a quantity big number next are going to be my line charts so let’s take a copy of sales
And want to build a line chart by month
Year of order date is still on here because I copied it let’s grab order date and change it to month
Bring sales up to rows turn it into a line chart I want a dual axis line chart for an area chart with a line chart overlay so I’m going to hold Ctrl down and drag sales to the right change this sales to an area chart as changes such to a dual axis by clicking the drop down and selecting dual axis
Hide this header and fill the entire screen we can also get rid of order date
Let’s call this total sales line
Duplicate that sheet and change it to quantity total sales quantity why sorry total quantity line and replace sales with quantity
On both sheets I actually don’t want an axis so I’m going to right click the axis uncheck show header on total sales very quickly access uncheck show header next let’s work on the year-over-year difference on the dashboard let’s take a copy of total sales
Duplicating that sheet and call it total sales year over year
This time I don’t want to filter to only 20 20. I’m going to drag the year over to those so I can see it I changed to sell up sales to a table calculation I want to be percent difference click on the drop down add a quick table calculation and two percent difference let’s change the formatting to be our percentage click ok 2021 or something 2020 is plus 29 percent let’s write a calculation to only show 2020 here over here by testing if year equals 2020 then true else false and
This is only 20. Click apply okay since we’re using table calculations we cannot add that feed field to the filter so let’s bring only 2020 up to rows and hide false
We’re not filtering we’re just hiding it click on the drop down on only 2020. And uncheck show header do the same thing for a year
Let’s remove the lines by right clicking on my number format and removing lines low dividers and column dividers
We’ll work on color later so but now we have year over year of minus 16 percent again duplicate total sales year over year and let’s call this total quantity year over year simply replace sales with quantity so let’s grab quantity move it over to text and let’s change this into a table calculation for a percent difference and we have negative 21 percent
Now we have all of this built so we have this box built and this box built let’s bring them into a dashboard next to add a new dashboard I prefer a size of generic desktop that’s just my preference I like tiled so we’re going to be using tiled view in this example let’s start with a base I’m going to start with a horizontal container I’m going to bring two blanks into it
I’m going to put two vertical containers into that
Foreign to highlight the first container and select distribute contents evenly let’s add two blanks to my verticals blank blank in that vertical and two blanks in my second vertical
Remove the original blanks and you’ll see I have four quadrants I like to do that as a base on my dashboard the total sales and total quantity are in the top left quadrant here so I’m gonna bring in a vertical container first holding shift to make it floating let’s change the color so we can see it and get gray
I want a title and then my big number and then a line chart let’s just bring in a title
Make it 24 point we’re going to call this total sales and get bold and Center click ok let’s add in my total sales sheet and my total sales line
It’s a little bit hard to see but let’s remove the titles
And remove this title
I’m going to change this one here to be white
And we’re actually going to change everything else to be white
Now the 609 is supposed to have the year over year next to it so let’s add a container I’m going to drag a horizontal container floating let’s just make it a different color so I can see it and I want to put sales year over year and my total sales let’s double click the handle to grab the entire thing and move it back into my container you’ll notice that I can move things around as floating and then as tile if you want to change anything from floating to tiled hold the shift key down so I’m holding the shift key down so I can drag it into my container
I want to fill evenly so click the drop down fill it evenly and remove titles
Let’s click on this sheet the year over year and fit entire View do the same with total sales
I have to manually change the size here
And I have a total sales band I can remove the access here by unchecking show header
Let’s go ahead and add a horizontal container to the top here
I’m going to add two blanks into it a little difficult to get the second one in and clear my blank on top
Let’s double click the container and uncheck and distribute contents evenly so all I did here was split this top container into two so I can put my total sales into that container again double click on the total sales container so you’re on the horizontal that it lives in click the drop down and distribute contents evenly now I can remove my blank and I have a total sales area I’m going to do the exact same thing with quantity
Now that I have total quantity in the dashboard I’m going to clean it up I want the dashboard to look like this so you’ll see that I have a total sales header with no padding in between and all white space around my three objects here in tableau let’s make sure total sales has a background
Of Gray does make it dark gray that’s fine let’s make sure total sales is white
And we have no padding
On these ones the only reason that you can see the gray behind is because there’s padding so I’m going to remove the padding from all of them including the containers so if I double click here there’s a container that this lives in change the padding to zero let’s do the same thing change the padding to zero on the line chart
Let’s add a background by double clicking everything so double click on the line chart double click on quantity double click to get this container double click again and we have the outside container let’s make this gray I like to use more colors pick screen color and pick this background
Now the background is gray let’s clean up the total sales line chart by getting rid of green uh grip grid lines
Double click the entire thing and I like to add a lot of padding and a border let’s just start with 16. 16 padding and I’m going to add a border
We also have one more line in the line chart to get rid of let’s format and get rid of the row divider so it’s completely clear I want a little bit of padding underneath the line chart so I’m going to grab a blank and put it there make it white
Zero padding and white make a little smaller I also like to add padding to just about everything inner padding I’m going to add 10 inner padding to my line chart and you see I have more lines that I didn’t know about the format and get rid of my column dividers as well
Let’s add padding to this let’s do a 10. Just brings it away from the edge
You remember from the beginning I had colored this box so I could see it just double click until I get to that box and remove make it wet
This band for the number is supposed to be left and this is supposed to be smaller and right so let’s go into the 609 000 total sales go to text make sure it’s left aligned go back to my dashboard I’m going to do the opposite on my year over year go into my year-over-year sheet change the text to be a little bit smaller let’s say 12. After it it says year over year fly okay and make sure it’s aligned to the right
Things are starting to take shape here a couple other little things I need to change this to to include currency so that’s format numbers change it to currency standard currency custom with the display unit of thousands looks a little bit better
We need a little bit more space
That’s double clicked
On the sales so I get the container let’s not distribute content savingly let’s just slide this over so this number is bigger this number is smaller and do the same thing for total quantity
Now that I have quantity set I want to do a couple things on formatting now remember that I used 16 point padding I double click onto this container I have everything set to 16. I like 16 to be around the entire box so you’ll see that this has 16 and quantity is 16. Let’s change the left of total quantity to be eight padding in the right of total sales to the eight padding
Looks a little better that way
The other thing I like to do here is make sure everything is exactly even so if I click on total sales I can see the layout see the height is 44. We can edit that let’s make it something even by editing height instead of 45.
Total quantity should be set exactly the same so let’s set the height to be 45 that just keeps everything even
Check this container and you can see that the height is 71. Let’s change it to 70. Foreign and do the same thing on my second container set the height to 70. Make sure I got that right I think it was 70. Set the height on this one to 195 and let’s set this
To 195.
Now we can remove the pin on that one so now my two charts should be exactly the same and I have some good big numbers next let’s build the sales and quantity comparison this bar and line chart add a new sheet call this bar and line I’m going to start by double clicking sales
And bringing quantity to the right of sales on rows let’s add date on columns change it to month
Not that kind of month I want a discrete month just the month no year make sure you’re is set to only 20 20.
Change the first sales to a bar chart and keep the second one as a line let’s remove order date click on the second pill quantity and set dual axis let’s change quantity to be a light blue and sales to be a dark blue apply okay and we have a bar with a line overlay let’s navigate back to the dashboard and incorporate my bar chart click on dashboard my bar and line chart into this container let me remove my blank and placeholder I don’t want a title
Don’t want any lines so that’s format and get rid of grid lines
Row dividers and column dividers
I also don’t want the title of each month
Let’s add padding to this as well
Add a change my outer padding to zero and inner padding should be 10. Let’s add a container
Add a vertical remember we want a title here I can actually copy sales so I’m just going to control C control V and drag that into my container put the bar chart in the total sales container make sure total sales has no padding
And this entire box should be colored White let’s take the entire box and do 16 padding
Just like before I have 16 on top and i’ve doubled it so i’ve got 32 padding between these two so I actually only want the top padding to be eight and that means on each of these boxes I need to take the padding on the bottom down to eight
Now it’s a little bit more uniform just double click this box I like to have a border
I also want these big numbers to be a little bit higher so let’s double click to get to the outer container the drop down and that’s not distributed contents evenly and that’s manually set this to be here looks pretty good on the total this changes to total sales and quantity
Click ok one thing I want to change here is the color so I have this line as a light blue I want to change everything up here in total quantity to be light blue a good way to take a color from one chart and apply it into another one is to copy the color so I’m going to go into this sheet double click on quantity in the color and double click on this color I can copy this HTML string click ok again now I can use that copied value go back to my dashboard and change all of the colors here in quantity so let’s change this text to be the HTML color that I copied and do the rest as well
That just makes my dashboard pop a little bit better the next section is going to be the map sales and quantity geography start by adding a new sheet just call it map
One we want States
Cities
Duplicate the latitude bill by holding Ctrl down and duplicating it on the first latitude let’s remove City and color it by sales
On a second latitude pill let’s call it City by quantity
You can also put quantity onto size let’s change the color of quantity to match that blue color that we used earlier edit colors and set that HTML color
Right now I can turn this into a dual axis chart clicking the drop down and selecting dual axis
Let’s make it a little bit bigger on the second pill and let’s add a border
So you can see the fields pop
Go back to your dashboard I’m going to put the map on the bottom do a very similar thing here that we did with total sales and quantity I’m just removing containers that I don’t want remove the blank let’s put the map inside a vertical I have a vertical let’s put the map in take a copy of that header and put it inside here remove the title remove padding
Remove padding from this as well
Double click
Set the outer cutting to 16. Of course we want gonna want left to be eight and top is going to be eight as well add a border
And let’s add a little bit of padding to the map as well 10 plus make sure the outside is white
Slide this up again we’re going to copy the exact dimensions height is 504 to edit that to be 500
And let’s take this total sales make sure we set the height to be 500. Mix them even to even things out a little bit double click tone quantity and make sure the right is also set to 8. The last piece I’m going to build is the sales and quantity distribution let’s start by dragging the region to rows and sales to rows I want this to be percent of total so let’s change sales to percent of total insert highest to lowest
Show that on the label and push it to the left remove my header and fit entire View we’ll call this region percentage
I want to add a background to this bar at the total of West so I want this here to be gray and this part to be gray and so on I’m going to start by typing window Max of sum of sales close that up
That computes to be the 31 percent make this gray the light gray will be just fine remove the label entering this into a dual axis
Make sure that the this is synchronized by right clicking selecting synchronize and make sure you change it back to a Barger
Window Max is going to be great
And total sales can be blue
You have to change the sort by moving sales to the right to put the blue on the top let’s remove the region we’re going to add that in a different way
Of course let’s remove all lines
Format get rid of grid lines and get rid of column and row headers well lines remove the axis as well foreign there’s one more line in here I want to get rid of it’s a zero line
And we have our region percentage chart it’s going to click back and do the same thing for quantity all right now we have the sales and quantity bar charts built the last piece is going to be to add shapes in order to add custom shapes navigate to this file on your computer gonna be this PC documents my tablet repository event shapes you can paste in any jpegs into one of these folders and it becomes available as a shape i’ve put in east north south and west image in my back in Tableau I’m going to duplicate this region I’m going to remove a couple things to make it a shape let’s remove my bar chart
Change it from a bar to a shape
Click on shape more shapes and navigate to the new folder mine is called Geo if that folder is not there click reload shapes and it should be there
Let’s click ok add region to shape as well click on shape again
And now I can set my shapes make sure you remove measure names and the shapes will show up we need the exact same thing for my bar chart let’s duplicate so I have two sets of shapes here I can start building my view let’s start with two containers build two horizontal containers one there one there one of them gets that one percentage the reason for region percentage and a shape to remove titles fit entire View remove this title
Fit entire View let’s get rid of measure names and measure values but put in my charts first I’m gonna move measure names measure values don’t need them remove titles
Make sure region is on the left
Clear my header and we have two bar charts those two bar charts are going to go in a vertical container but the container will also have my title so just copy the title and drop it into the container I’m going to add a horizontal container within the vertical add two blanks to it
Make it a little bigger so I can get to it input both of my bar charts with the regions inside the container
Double click until you get to the outside level and put it on top remove my blank remove this blank and this blank
And let’s make it a little bit bigger if it doesn’t fit the entire View double click until you get to a pin and remove the PIN
Let’s do some formatting so let’s change this to be 16.
Of course left is going to be eight bottom is going to be eight
And I want a border
Total sales has a zero padding all of these are going to have zero padding
The container should also have zero padding this container should also have zero padding and let’s set this entire thing to be white
Let’s add i’ll add a little bit of inner padding
Set inner padding to 10. And set this inner padding to 10. Same thing with my regions
Just gives them some space
At this point the dashboard is just about ready and we can just set some sizes that’s a dashboard in Tableau hope this helps