In data discovery and analysis, you will likely create numerous data visualizations. Each of these visualizations gives you a snapshot of a story within the data. Each insight into the data answers a question or two. At times, the discovery and analysis phase is enough for you to make a key decision and the cycle is complete. In other cases, you will need to bring the snapshots together to communicate a complete and compelling story to your intended audience.

Tableau allows you to bring together related data visualizations into a single dashboard. This dashboard could be a static view of various aspects of the data or a fully interactive environment, allowing users to dynamically filter, drill down, and interact with the data visualizations.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at most of these concepts within the context of several in-depth examples, where we'll walk through the dashboard design process, step by step. Like before, don't worry about memorizing lists of instructions. Instead, focus on understanding why and how the components and aspects of dashboards work.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to dashboards
• Examples of dashboards
• Interactivity with actions
• Designing for different displays
• Story points

For the examples in this chapter, we'll return to the Superstore Sales sample data we used in the previous chapters. Go ahead and create a new workbook with a connection to that dataset.