In our work configuring Tableau, creating extensions and building dashboards for clients, we’ve found that the most forward-thinking organizations see investing in a Tableau license as just the start. They realize that customizing your Tableau deployment to your unique use cases is the key to making the most of the platform, and one way to do this is to streamline the communication and write-back processes to optimize workflows.
Here are 10 practical tips — five readily applicable in basic Tableau, five relying on write-back extensions — that will help you identify and create opportunities to make collaborative insight discovery easier and more rewarding. We hope you will use them as jumping-off points to come up with solutions to tailor Tableau to your team’s needs.
USING CORE TABLEAU FEATURES
Let’s start with a couple things you can natively do in Tableau to facilitate communication about dashboard content.
1. Comment on views
Commenting on a view is the simplest way to start a conversation about — and inside — a dashboard. A core Tableau feature since version 10.4, it enables users in your active directory to discuss views and tag and notify each other to make sure messages relevant to specific team members don’t get lost or ignored. Although the Comments pane is limited in its focus to a complete view and doesn’t give you the option to directly annotate specific data points, you can still share interactive snapshots of data in the discussion — already a big step towards cutting down on the time spent hopping in and out of Tableau to collaborate on dashboard content.