Landing Page for Tableau Public and monitoring

  

I do not know yours, but my Tableau Public page is a "mess". I do not have so many visualizations, but I would like to be able to reorder them to put my favorites on top and regroup the ones for Workout Wednesday for instance together. 

Currently Tableau Public doesn't have the same capabilities as Tableau Server or Online, so you can only change your first view by making it your "principal" or republishing the views in the correct order to do it.

Maybe this functionality will soon exist and we will have projects or collections in Tableau Public, so we could regroup our visualizations to a cleaner display. But as I am quite impatient, I decided to create, for fun, my own landing page and on the same occasion group my views by collection.


The goal was to provide quick discovery of my portfolio by theme and then a drill down into the views with the capacity to open the selected view. In term of design,  I tried to give a nice touch for the full workbook using only pink and grey.

The Data

For the data, I could have copy-pasted my url links on an excel, but I decided to use the Tableau Public logs instead, so it is faster and I can integrate more statistics (for instance: when a dashboard has been published or the numbers of views...) to drive the reader decisions. 

Some time ago I created an analysis of my Tableau Public profile link using the wonderful blog of Jeffrey A. Shaffer (link). 

Jeffrey explains very well how to download your own data and perform some calculations to be able to use it.  The idea was to analyze how well/bad my visualizations are perceived, why some generated a lot of views/ likes... and some not.

So I just pull the data using the link below and save the result as a JSON file.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/api/nameofyourtableaupublicprofile/workbooks?count=300&index=0

On this data, you can find the title of your vizzes, the date of publication, the number of views, favorites, the url (after some work) and many more.


URL calculation:

To have the correct URL, you need to split the default view repo URL field and then join them to remove the "/sheet" part.

URL Field :

"https://public.tableau.com/profile/nameofyourtableaupublicprofile#!/vizhome/"+[split1]+[split2]


Date of publication:

The date provides a first date and last date of publication, but it is the wrong format and you need to correct it a bit:

First date of publication :
DATE(DATEADD('second', INT(INT([First Publish Date])/1000), #1970-01-01#))

The rest of the fields are really straight forward. 


Navigation

The workbook is composed of 3 dashboards :

  • the first one is a landing page
  • the second one is a drill-down from the landing page
  • the third is a decision dashboard to help you choose which one to have a look. 
The idea is to drive the reader in exploring my vizzes, so the landing page orders the vizzes by categories, the second one by statistics (views and likes) and the third one is made for exploration. To navigate between the 3 dashboards I used filters actions or buttons and to navigate to the vizzes in Tableau Public, I applied url actions.


Landing View


The Landing view is created by displaying the 13 categories I have created by grouping my vizzes in the data in a field called "Category". 

    

You need to have a picture to display each category, here I take one of my vizzes. You need to save the pictures in the Tableau Repository Folder/ shapes/ and you can even create a new folder.


In order that the categories are distributed correctly, 

In column I placed the following calculation INDEX()%4 (because I want 4 columns)

In rows : if index()/4 =int(index()/4) then index()/ 4 else int(index()/4)+1 END

> > the 2 tables calculation are being computed by the category field

Shape : "Category" and you need to assign each category to the shapes. A good tip is to pre name the images the same as the fields to assign and sort the field alphabetically. By assigning it should work very fine :).

Color : I played with the opacity so the Labels appear clearly and the image is on the background.


I have also created a set based on the field category, in order to use it later ( right click on the field/ select create/ set/ and just choose one)


Then into the dashboard view, I apply two actions :

  • set action that will change the category by clicking
  • go to sheet action : that will go to the drill down dashboard


Drill Down

By doing these two actions, the users will arrive direcly in this page with the set selected and then the dashboard from this category displayed.


From instance here the category sciences and Health is selected and the 5 dashboards from this category are displayed. You can change the category by clicking on the menu on the left and the grey part on the right will be filtered. 


Menu on the right :

The menu on the right is in reality a gantt chart

column : nothing

rows : category and min(1)

type : Gantt Chart

Label : category

color : the set based on category ( if the category is the one selected in the set I apply a pink color, otherwise it will be grey)

Then on the dashboard, you need to set up a set action : changing the value of the set by clicking on the "menu". We do not need to create an action filter to filter the greyed details views on the right because I put a filter on the dashboard keeping only set category=true.


Detailled views on the right :

Nothing really new here, I have just changed sighly the calculations because I wanted to have 3 columns and 2 rows ( I do not have more than 6 views per category).


Decision Dashboard

In case that the reader doesn't know which category to choose or wants to have a more proactive approach, I provided some of the metrics that you usually find in Tableau Server as the number of views. Here the information retrieved from the API is quite useful.

Again here I used the set action to color the category selected in pink.



When you select a category, a new worksheet appears and displays the visuals matching this category. 


To do it you need to have your selection view ( here KPI)  and the detailled view (drill down) on the same dashboard container and then create an action filter on the dashboard. The important part is that clearing the selection will exclude all values, so the worksheet disappears.




I couldn't resist by adding a little heart that drives the users directly to my favorite viz :) using a direct URL action.

I hope you enjoy this dashboard and blog, the dashboard is downloadable in Tableau Public, if anything was not clear enough.

Do not forget to vote for your favorite ideas in the Tableau Forum, to push your favorite features, I vote for mine : collection in Tableau Public ! VOTE TODAY!


Rati