Creating Stories in Tableau

What is a Story in Tableau?

Stories are universal tools of engagement. They move through us, guiding us on a journey marked by peril, victory, loss, and love. While stories are as old as time, Tableau offers a modern and powerful medium to share stories. 

So, what exactly is a Tableau story? It’s a lot like a traditional story, but in this case, you can think of the central question as being the hero, the data, the exposition, and the charts as a series of conflicts leading to the climax and the call to action as the plot resolution. And, of course, the visual aesthetics become your personal writing style! 

In essence, a Tableau story narrates key insights to answer a data question via a series of logically connected visuals. We build Tableau stories using a collection of sheets in a Tableau workbook called story points.

You might think, why use Tableau stories at all?  Isn’t PowerPoint a good enough presentation tool? There are a few reasons why you might want to leverage Tableau instead. 

A Tableau story employs effective storytelling techniques, including creating a logical progression via the story toolbar at the top of the storyboard, allowing users to move easily from left to right. It also allows you to add annotations directly onto your charts to describe some of the most important elements of your story. In addition, its interactive widgets are a great way to capture your audience’s attention. Tableau’s inbuilt aesthetic designs are an added bonus.

How to Create Stunning Tableau Stories

Unfortunately, not all stories are created equal. Just take a look at book or movie ratings online – not all stories win the hearts and minds of their intended audience. 

To create incredible Tableau stories, remember to follow visualization best practices and apply the following rules:

Lead with the end

Think about how your presentation will look like. Imagine what you want to convey to the audience and how the story will fulfill your goal. This visualization process is an important step to bridge the gap between the “how” of the mechanics of performing the analysis and the “why” of the significance of producing such an analysis. Remember the impact you wish the presentation to have on your audience.

Literally “lead with the end”

Stakeholders generally lack the time and patience to sit through yet another presentation, so get to the point. You should state your thesis in one or two bullet points in the first story point. The charts that follow are supporting arguments for your thesis.

Use the seven types of data stories

This concept was originally introduced by Ben Jones, co-founder and CEO of Data Literacy, previously Technical Evangelism Director at Tableau. It describes seven data story types to leverage to build a powerful data story: changes over time, drill down, zoom out, contrast, intersection, factors, and outliers. Each story type has its own set of visual templates. Check out this sample workbook to give you an idea of charts to use in your next story.

Annotate your charts 

Beware of the curse of knowledge! You shouldn’t assume that your end users have all the necessary context to understand the chart on its own. While you may have turned the data upside down to find meaningful insights and patterns, your stakeholders are most likely seeing the chart for the first time. 

Now that we’ve introduced Tableau stories, let’s dive into more detail! We’ll work with the Spotify Music Dataset from DataCamp to build a Tableau story.