Tutorial – How to Create Free Dashboards with Tableau Public?

With its intuitive interface, powerful visualizations, and vibrant community, Tableau Public empowers anyone to unlock the stories hidden within their data.

Create your first dashboard for free. This detailed guide offers more details on each step, from data preparation to dashboard sharing. It also incorporates bonus tips and considerations to help you confidently navigate the platform.

Tableau is a visual analytics platform that allows you to connect to multiple data sources, providing exploration through an intuitive interface and enabling data-driven decision-making. It was created in 2003 and has been owned by Salesforce since 2019. It is currently one of the world’s most famous and widespread platforms for creating data visualizations. Through this tool, you can create dashboards to view different reports. Creating these dashboards is very simple since Tableau’s logic is based on drag and drop. In this blog, we will discuss creating free dashboards on Tableau Public.

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What is Tableau Public?

Tableau Public is the primary software for creating business visualizations and analytics. It is the free version, with almost all its potential, but with the limitation of saving all creations in Tableau Public, making it perfect for learning or students.

Let us learn how to create your first dashboard in Tableau Public.

• Create your Tableau Public Profile
• Sheet 1
• Sheet 2
• Sheet 3
• Sheet 4
• Sheet 5
• Create the Dashboard

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Create your Tableau Public Profile

Join Tableau Public using your name and email ID. Choose a password. You will receive your profile activation email, activate it, and sign in.

Login and enter Tableau Public. You will see the Viz of the Day. This special feature of Tableau Public allows users to create dashboards in the given template.

• Go to My Profile.

You will see a blank workspace and an option to create your dashboard named Create Viz.

• Click Create Viz. You will be redirected to a new page asking you to Connect to Data. You can either upload the data from your system or drag and drop the file.

I am using sample data from WHO that lists the information regarding COVID-19 global cases.

• After you upload your data, you can name your project. 

In the footer, you can see that the Data Source is listed in one tab, and once the data source is uploaded, Sheet 1 is generated. You can generate individual visualizations in these tabs. Just keep clicking on the next tabs, and new Sheets will be created.

Sheet 1

• On Sheet 1, choose the Cumulative cases data from different countries. 
• Select Country and then select Cumulative cases while holding the CTRL key.

• Drag and drop the selected fields in the center area.
• Check the Show Me option at the upper right side. The available charts/graphs can be chosen from the given options. 

Since we want to present Cumulative case data globally, selecting the map to show the intensity of new cases will be a good idea. 

• Choose the map option while selecting the global data.

• Check that the data is now represented on the world map. 

Right now, the spread intensity is not clear properly; hence we will select the colour palate and use suitable colours to highlight the data. 

• Click Show Me again. You will now see an option for Edit Colors. 

Here we will select the Red-Green-Diverging option, where red will present the highest number of cases, and green will represent the lower number of cases.

See that the desired colour palate applies, but the colour coding is incorrect. There is an option for Reverse, which allows the colours to be swapped.

So now we have the desired colour-coded representation of the data.

• Rename the sheet.

Sheet 2

• Now pick some other table. Click + next to the first sheet. Sheet 2 will be created; rename it.
• Similarly, drag and drop the table headings to the work area and select the chart of your choice.

In this tab, we will select Country and New Deaths data. We will present this data in a horizontal bar chart.

• Sort the data in descending order. You can scroll down the chart to check the rest of it. 

Sheet 3

• Add a new sheet to represent the global WHO data.
• Drag and drop the table headings – WHO region and WHO COVID-19 Global data.
• Choose the desired chart format. We have selected the packed bubble graph.

You can increase and decrease the chart size with the resize option.

As you can see, the chart does not have all the labels required. We need the number for every region, so we will again select the table headings – WHO region and WHO COVID-19 Global data and drag & drop them on Label. 

The chart now has labels with the data for every region.

Sheet 4

• Similarly, in a new sheet, generate a chart for Cumulative deaths.
• Drag and drop the data on the working area and select the Treemap chart.

Sheet 5

In the next sheet, we will present new cases Y-O-Y. To represent this, select Date Reported and New Cases.

You can see that Tableau Public takes data reported in columns and New cases in rows and generates a line chart.

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Creating Dashboard

• Create a dashboard if you have covered all the data on your visualizations. 
• Click the sign highlighted in the image footer to create a new dashboard. 

The new dashboard will list all the previously created sheets at the left center. You can drag and drop the sheets according to your preference for reporting.

• Fix the size of the dashboard if needed.

• Name your dashboard and publish it. It will be publicly visible.

• Download your dashboard in the desired format.

Here is the final dashboard that we downloaded in image format.

We hope this article helped you to understand how Tableau Public works. Follow the step-wise process and create your first dashboard on Tableau Public for free.

To check the dashboard we created in this tutorial, click here.