October 2024 — Ann Pregler

6 Tips For Inheriting a Dashboard

Posted on October 21, 2024October 22, 2024 by Ann

When you work with Tableau professionally, one thing is inevitable: Sooner or later, you’re going to inherit a dashboard that someone else built. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a dashboard from a reliable team member who is still around to answer questions. If you’re less lucky, it’ll be from someone who left the company and can’t help you out. Hopefully there’s some documentation to help you out, but often there isn’t.

So where do you start? In this post, I’ll share the five steps I always take when inheriting a dashboard from another developer, plus some handoff tips for your own dashboards to prepare to pass them on one day.

Advanced Tableau Color Palettes

Posted on October 15, 2024October 15, 2024 by Ann

Good Tableau visualization relies heavily on good use of color. Tableau provides a selection of default color palettes, which are a pretty solid place to start; however, there’s plenty of room to do better!

Last year, I wrote about how to create your own custom color palettes in this blog post. Today, we’ll zoom in on one particular type of custom color palette – ordered gradients – and look at three advanced use cases: Better diverging colors, more levels of detail in color, and dynamically assigned categorical colors.

Level Up: ‘Reset Filters’ Button (With No Highlighting!)

Posted on October 8, 2024October 8, 2024 by Ann

When you have a Tableau dashboard with lots of filtering options, it’s easy to dive too deep into the filters and get a bit lost. When that happens to your users, an easy “reset filters” button is a lifeline! Creating a handy one-click way to clear filters is an essential skill in every Tableau designer’s toolkit. In today’s blog post, I’ll show you how to create a filter reset button. (Plus, I’ll walk you through how to get rid of the blue highlighting that you might be left with after following some other tutorials out there.)