Background templates - Tableau Tutorial

- [Narrator] Background templates provide visual structure for developers to build stunning dashboards. Templates can speed up development time and increase visual appeal for your analytic tools. Background templates are created using both internal and external tools. In most cases, people have access to PowerPoint, which is why we'll be demonstrating it in this lesson. But if you have something else like InDesign or another graphic design tool that you're familiar with, please feel free to use that. The two major steps in creating background templates involve creating the visual background in a tool like PowerPoint, saving it as an image, and then creating your Tableau sheets in your workbook. Once this is accomplished, you can combine those two pieces of work into one holistic dashboard with a background image and sheets overlaid. Note that you can overlay sheets on top of a background image using containers that are floating, so for those that are more comfortable with a tiled dashboard, you'll be able to leverage containers that float over a background image so that you can develop in your comfort zone. A handy trick when you're developing images in PowerPoint is that one inch in PowerPoint is equal to 100 pixels in Tableau. So if you have a 1,400-by-1,400-pixel dashboard that you've developed in Tableau, that's a 14-inch-by-14-inch slide in PowerPoint. Once you create your background image in a PowerPoint slide, all you need to do is save it as an image and layer it behind your dashboard. Now, you might be thinking, "Well, what about if I have different devices that are going to be leveraging my dashboard? How does my background image affect that?" Well, to get the most use out of your background image, a pro tip is to create background templates for each device. You can store these images in your default dashboard in Device Designer for use in desktop, phone, and tablets, and you can bring in whichever image you need for whichever device. So then you've got that clean, crisp background on any device that your dashboard will be rendered in. Let's jump into both PowerPoint and Tableau to see how this works in a practical use case. Now, as part of your data pack that we've provided you, we've given you both the background images that are pre-generated and the PowerPoint file so that you can investigate how it was originally created. If you don't have PowerPoint, no worries. You can always develop your own background image in a different tool, but if you'd like to investigate how the background image was originally created before it was turned into an image, you can open up the Maven Roasters background template PowerPoint file. We're going to do that right now and just give you a brief overview of how these backgrounds were created. Let's double click on our PowerPoint template and open that up. All right, so now we're in PowerPoint, and we're looking at our templates. We have two templates that we're going to use, one for the main page of the dashboard and one for the detail page of the dashboard. What you're looking at right now is the main page of the dashboard. It's got your high level KPIs up top, your filter sheets in the middle, and then plenty of space down on the bottom of the dashboard to place your sheets. It's important not to overdo it with your background images as you don't want them to be too busy. You just want them to be clean and crisp and add something extra to your dashboard. Your background image should create a structure so that you can easily place your visualizations into your dashboard and also give it some visual interest. You can see here that we have some images layered in the background. One of these is just coffee beans up on the top left-hand corner. We've layered that behind the other visualizations. We've got an icon for our logo of Maven Roasters, and then we've got a few shapes which are just layered into the view, and they will hold our KPI values. Now, these are easy to create in PowerPoint, and we're not going to get into all the nitty gritty details, but just as a quick overview, you can insert any shapes using the insert ribbon here, then you can insert your shapes here. You can customize the outlines of the shapes and many other features, but one quick tip, if you want to add a little bit of 3D to the dashboard, a little bit of elevation off of the back of the screen, you can always play with the shadow. If you click on your shape and you go to Shape Effects, you can always add a shadow right here in this menu. This will give you that slightly raised look on the right-hand side of your shape. We also play it a little bit with our lines, having darker ones for our KPI circles, and having some dotted lines for our filter boxes. On the detail dashboard, we've also added some extra boxing around the headers for each section of our dashboard. These can be particularly useful when you have a very long scrolling type dashboard that has different sections that need delineation. We've also integrated some custom icons to give the dashboard a little bit extra in terms of visuals. Once we've designed our background images, all we need to do is go to File, Save As, Browse, and then instead of saving this as a PowerPoint, we can actually go ahead and save this as an image. You can use any of the image files, but we typically prefer to use PNGs. Now I'm going to cancel this because I've already created the background images for the course and they're included in your packet as well. Let's jump into Tableau Desktop and see how to add our background images into our dashboard. So we're back in Tableau Desktop. We're going to go ahead and add a new dashboard right here. Let's go ahead and drag our dashboard to the front, and we're going to go ahead and just name it Maven Roasters. We'll create another dashboard and drag it right next to Maven Roasters, and that will be called Maven Roasters Detail, and there we go. We're going to go ahead and resize both dashboards. Let's go ahead and change this to a fixed size. We're going to modify this to be 1,400 by 1,400. Remember that when we were in PowerPoint, we're dealing in inches, but when we're in Tableau, we're dealing in pixels. So when we change our dashboards to 1,400 by 1,400, that's in pixel size. You'll remember that when we talked about this in PowerPoint, we can actually do the conversion fairly easily. If we go back to PowerPoint, we can quickly check the size of our slide by going to Design, going to Slide Size, and choosing Custom Slide Size. When you go into Slide Size, you can customize the width and the height of your slide. You'll see that we have 14 inches by 14 inches here, so that's going to get the correct aspect ratio in Tableau for a 1,400-by-1,400-pixel dashboard. Okay, so we're back in Tableau. Let's bring in our background images for Maven Roasters and Maven Roasters Detail. All we need to do is go over to Floating, choose an image, drag it into the corner, and choose an image from our location. Now, as we mentioned before, you have the standard background images already in the data file that you downloaded, but if you want to modify this in any way, you can go into the PowerPoint or another tool, modify the background image, and bring it in. In this case, we're going to bring in the stock images that we've created. Let's go ahead and choose Maven Roasters background image. Click Open. We're not going to change any of the fit or text or anything like that 'cause this will be layered in the background. Then we're going to go over to Layout, and we're going to kitty corner this into the corner. So we're going to go 00 for our XY,