The webpage dashboard item in Tableau has a nearly unlimited number of uses. One that clicked into place for me recently was the ability to embed surveys into dashboards to collect new information from users without the need for a third-party Tableau add on.

My organization uses Qualtrics to manage surveys and user inputs, so that’s what you’ll see in the screenshots throughout this post – however, Google Forms is a free alternative that would embed just as easily.

The how-to is very simple. Drag the “Web Page” item onto your dashboard, and enter the link to your survey. If you’re using Qualtrics or another platform that lets you include data in your URL, you can encode that into your link using parameters. For example, the dashboard pictured below contains a survey that allows users to enter a program model for an individual student. Because the user has already selected the student using a parameter, I can pass that student’s ID number into the URL, and my survey associates it with the user’s response. All the user has to do is click the edit pencil icon, and the survey appears embedded in the workbook. Clicking the X again closes it.

The screenshot below shows another use case for embedded surveys as part of a workflow monitoring dashboard. In this example, which is used for monitoring incident reports, users from a school district admin department need to submit a form to approve reports. By clicking the square next to the incident, they can open the form and submit their approval without ever leaving the Tableau dashboard. (In this case, the web page item is hidden using dynamic zone visibility. When the user selects “Open Form”, a parameter action makes the web page visible.)

Finally, another example of where embedded surveys could be used. This is perhaps the most obvious – for surveys! When you have a dashboard that’s showing survey results, you can embed a survey web page directly in the dashboard to allow viewers to submit their own responses to the survey.

Depending on your data source structure, you can choose whether to allow new survey responses to show up right away (a live or extract-refresh data source), or whether to wait until you have viewed and approved the responses (a manually refreshed extract). Be sure to consider the audience for your dashboard and the likely responders before making a decision!