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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 let’s remove the lines by right clicking on my number format and removing lines low dividers and column dividers 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 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 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 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 let’s click on this sheet the year over year and fit entire View do the same with total sales 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 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 double click the entire thing and I like to add a lot of padding and a border let’s just start with 16.