The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Click here to see all posts in the series.
I’ve got a quick upgrade for you today! In this post, I’ll show you how to add a timestamp to your dashboards that shows the last time the data was updated. It’s especially helpful for live data, or manually refreshed extracts, but it’s also just a good habit to include on all pages.
The key here is that we need to use a worksheet title. For whatever reason, Tableau doesn’t allow us to include the update time anywhere else – but it is built into the title field!
Create a Worksheet
Step one – create a worksheet. You’ll need to put some data here, which should be from the data source you’re interested in showing update times for. It actually doesn’t matter what you put in here – choose anything. (Fields with a small number of values are nice to use because they’re faster to hide).
Now let’s fix this worksheet up. We just want the title, so go ahead and right click on every header in the view and select “hide”.
When you’re done hiding everything that shouldn’t be showing (that is, everything except the title), we’re ready to move on.
Edit the Title
Double click on the title to edit it.
By default, the title will just include the sheet name. Delete <Sheet Name> from the title, click insert, and select “Data Update Time”.
You can add anything other text around the update time that you want – in my example, I’ve added “Last Data Update:” in front of the time stamp.
You’ll probably want to change the formatting of the title as well – try making the text smaller and lighter to make the timestamp more subtle.
Add to Dashboard
All that’s left to do is add your new sheet to the dashboard! I won’t go into detail about this, because it’s exactly what it says on the tin – take the new sheet, and drag it onto the dashboard in your preferred spot.
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