When Tableau first introduced Stories, I didn’t fully appreciate their value. A few weeks later, I was asked to judge a data visualization contest at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park. The contestants were provided multiple datasets and were given 60 minutes to analyze one of them. Each team had 60 seconds to present their findings to the judges.

The winning team presented a cogent set of findings with a compelling storyline. Even more impressive—each person on the winning team contributed 20 seconds of verbal narrative supported by Tableau Story Point visuals simply by clicking through descriptive captions. That’s when the real value of Stories became apparent to me.

Perhaps the story could have been told with a series of visualizations and dashboards, but each individual Story Point made it easier for the team to communicate quickl0,y and clearly annotating each Story Point highlighted important facts without the need for verbalizing the finding. It was an impressive presentation that didn’t feel cramped by the 1-minute time limit.

Turning Analysis into Insight

Stories are a type of sheet made up of dashboard or worksheet views that have been sequenced to support a guided analytic tour of your subject. These views are expressed as Story Points and introduced through navigation captions that include descriptive text provided by the author.

Creating a story is similar to building a dashboard. You drag the desired source material into the sheet. Each Story Point can contain one worksheet or dashboard. You provide context to the sheet by adding text to captions contained in a navigation bar across the top of the view. The captions can be rearranged, edited, or deleted. Further emphasis can be added within the view through annotation, descriptions, filtering, or any other method supported within worksheets or dashboards.

You have probably used PowerPoint slide decks to tell stories and convey a priority or to convince your colleagues to buy into an action plan. Many Tableau users have embedded static Tableau images into PowerPoint slide decks in the past. Stories allow you to skip that step entirely while supporting your findings with fully interactive views of your data.

Stories can be a fun way to explore your favorite sport or hobby. You can explore the U.S. Supreme Court or pivotal moments in American history. Have fun and get creative. Building Stories about topics that interest you away from work will advance your skills that you apply on the job.

To build effective Stories, your process should include the following:

• Deciding what type of story you want to tell
• Building evidence in Story Points to support your thesis
• Organizing your arguments in a logical sequence
• Adding descriptions and annotations that highlight the important evidence
• Providing supporting details

Similar to how you would write a position paper, create an outline before you start putting your workbook together. Know where you’re going to start, know the journey you’re taking your audience on, and plan your finish so that you conclusion is supported with facts.

Building a Story

Once you know what you need to convey, creating a Story Point deck is easy. Your worksheets and dashboards should include relevant filters and actions for filtering and highlighting the content just as they would if you were performing your own analysis of the data. Remember that after content is placed in the Story, you must navigate back to the source worksheet or dashboard to make design changes. Thinking through your design before this stage will reduce your workload when polishing your Story Point deck at the end. These are the key points to remember:

• The Story Point main title is static.
• Each Story Point tab can hold one worksheet or one dashboard.
• Set the Story Point size pixel width and height to fit your presentation environment.

To create a Story, click the New Story tab to the right of the Sheet tabs, as shown in Figure 10-1.

Alternatively, you can use the Story menu or Story icon to start.

The Story Workspace

The left side of the Story Workspace in Figure 10-1 looks similar to a Dashboard workspace. Worksheets contained in the workbook are visible. Dashboards would also appear in that space if there were any in the workbook. The Description icon is used to add floating text boxes to the view. The Navigator check box lets you turn on (or off) arrows that enable scrolling of the Navigator bar. Figure 10-1 includes only a blank Caption. When more than one Caption is in view, these arrows will appear by default. The Story area allows you to define the width and height of your story. The Show Title check box appears at the bottom of the pane. Defining size and adding a title are consistent with how these features work in Dashboards.

The Story workspace allows you to define a couple of critical items before you begin to drag dashboards or views into the workspace:

1. Make the appropriate changes to the Story size you see near the bottom left of Figure 10-2.
2. Decide if you want a static story title at the top. In most cases, the dashboard or worksheet title will serve your needs. If you do want a Story Point title, make sure the Show Title option is selected.

The laptop-size pixel height and width are being used in the Story show in Figure 10-2. The Show Title option is selected, and the title has been customized by double-clicking within the title area, typing, and then formatting the text. Adding worksheets or dashboards into a Story is done by dragging them into the Story workspace. Notice that there are four Navigator buttons at the top of Figure 10-2. These buttons contain captions that have been edited to include customized text. Also notice that the Navigator button arrows are now visible because more than one button is in view and the Show Back/Forward Buttons option is checked in the Navigator area of the Dashboards and Worksheets pane.

The Navigator button that contains the caption text starting with Story Point 1 is currently active. Notice that the three other captions are colored with a lighter shade of brown. This color scheme is defined using the Format ⇒ Story menu option.

You can add additional Story Points in three ways. To the right of the Navigator buttons, two of the following three options are displayed:

• New Blank Point
• Duplicate
• Save as New Point

Selecting New Blank Point creates a new Navigator button with a blank caption and an empty Story workspace that is ready to accept a new worksheet or dashboard. The Duplicate option will create an exact copy of whatever Story Point is active with a blank caption. Save as New Point only appears as an option if you have modified an existing Story Point that you want to save under a new Navigation button. Building Story Points is very easy to do if you are familiar with making worksheets and dashboards. If you want more details on the Story workspace tool options, go to the Help ⇒ Open Help menu option and read the Stories section of Tableau’s online manual.

A Story Example

The example that follows uses a Story created by InterWorks consultant Robert Rouse. The Story was embedded in a blog post that you can find at https://www.interworks.com/blog/rrouse/2014/10/15/every-pitch-2014-mlb-season-visualized-tableau.

The data source used for the workbook includes all of the pitches thrown by every pitcher in Major League Baseball for the 2014 season—that’s 765,122 pitches. The type of pitch, speed, and placement of the pitch are also included.

After a worksheet or dashboard is added to a Story Point, you can edit the caption text at the top of the view. In Figure 10-3 you see the first Story Point caption has been edited to say “All the pitches of the 2014 season.”

Robert’s Story includes seven different Story Points. The Navigation buttons have been formatted to match the color and style of the dashboards used to create each Story Point.

Formatting Story Points

The Start View Dashboard that is the source of the Story Point displayed in Figure 10-3 includes a lot of custom formatting. The text boxes at the top and the bottom were added in the source Dashboard used in the Story Point.

In Figure 10-4, the Eephus pitch is highlighted. The Eephus pitch isn’t a common pitch type, and even avid baseball fans might not be familiar with the term. This was added to the view in the Story workspace by dragging the Description object from the Dashboards and Charts pane and positioning it at the top of the view.

A second Description was added in the bar chart area that includes dynamic data elements for average pitch speed and the percentage of total pitches thrown. This is highlighted in the lower-left area of Figure 10-4. You can see that the Eephus pitch was only 0.05 percent of the total pitches thrown in 2014, and the average speed of the pitch was 66 miles per hour.

To open the Format Story pane, select Format ⇒ Story. The Story Point formatting for Figure 10-4 is shown in Figure 10-5.

As you see, the Format Story pane includes options for controlling shading, font, alignment, and borders. By combining design elements from your source worksheets and dashboards with additional (specific) design Descriptions, Captions, and formatting in your Story Point, you can create stylized Story Points with helpful descriptions and dynamic data to highlight important information. You can download the workbook containing Robert’s Story Point deck in the Chapter 10 folder in the book’s companion website.

Sharing Your Story Point Deck

Once you’ve completed your Story, you share it in the same way you publish any workbook view—by publishing to a secure Tableau Server location or to Tableau Public. The Story Point deck used in this chapter was published to Tableau Public and embedded in the blog post referenced earlier in the chapter. It appeared on the InterWorks blog November 13, 2014.

You can also share a Story Point by exporting the view as a packaged workbook and sharing the workbook with other people via Tableau Desktop or Tableau Reader. Keep in mind that if the dashboards and worksheets used in your Story Point change, the data used in the Story Point visualizations change as well, but the Story Point titles do not unless they are part of the underlying worksheet or dashboard. If you decide to publish Story Point decks to Tableau Server, make sure that your Description objects and annotations include appropriate information so that your audience can properly interpret the information. For this reason, Story Points are most appropriate for presentations that you are conducting live or for consumption in Tableau Server or Tableau Public using static datasets.

Finally, if you have to lead a discussion that relies on analysis you’ve created in Tableau, a Story can be an excellent tool for guiding your audience through the discussion. Using Presentation mode, you’ll have a fully interactive slide deck that will allow you to respond to questions you may not have anticipated in the original presentation within your Story. Because Stories are connected to the source data you can filter, highlight an annotated existing Story Points to reveal new information. After your presentation, you can publish the workbook to Tableau Server for other people to review.

This completes Part I of the Tableau Desktop content. In Part II, you learn about how to install, manage, and automate Tableau Server.