Hi there and welcome back. In the last few lessons, we went over the worksheet screen with a fine tooth comb, so you could start to get a feel for what all of the little buttons and bubbles do. In these next lessons, we'll do the same thing for the dashboard screen, which is the other place where you'll be spending quite a lot of time when building visualizations. After these lessons, you'll be able to identify the various parts that make up the tableau dashboard screen. The anatomy of the dashboard screen. Once you have a workbook open, or if you're just continuing on from the last lesson, look at the bottom of the worksheets screen and click the new dashboard button, the one with the little square divided into quadrants. Along the top, we have the same toolbars that we had in the worksheet screen, so we won't go over this again. On the left in the sidebar, you'll see a tab for dashboard and a tab for layout. Let's start with the dashboard tab. First, you'll have a button that says Device Preview. This button will start the device designer, which allows you to see what your visible look like on various devices; desktops, phones, and tablets, and also rearrange things to best fit on each device. Click it again to exit the device designer. Below device preview, you'll see a size panel. This is where you set whether your dashboard will be automatically sized, a fixed size, or you can set a range of allowable sizes. Click the size drop-down, and then click on the next drop-down and select range if it isn't already selected. Under range, notice that you can check or uncheck the minimum or maximum size, allowing no minimum or no maximum. Or you can set both the min and the max. Now instead of range, select automatic. Automatic size means that no matter how big or how small the user screen or browser window is, the dashboard will size to fit it. I wouldn't recommend this because if you have a small screen, it will squish all the way down to fit the small screen and everything will be illegible most likely. If you have a very large screen, then everything will stretch out and there will be way too much wide space in between your elements. If you use this in conjunction with the device designer, it could possibly work. But for now, I would recommend avoiding the automatic sizing. I would stick with either a range or a fixed size, with the latter being the easier option to design for as you're just getting started. Click that drop-down one more time and select fixed. You can now specify the exact dimensions of your dashboard. Closing the drop-down menus, we can continue moving down to the sheet section. This will list all of the worksheet in your workbook. Click one and drag it out to where it says, drop sheets here. Notice that there's a blue check-mark on the sheet icon on the left. This means that the sheet is already on your dashboard and you can't add it again. Hovering over each sheet name, you'll see on the right hand side, a little icon that allows you to quickly go to that sheet so that you can make edits or whatever there. You also get a little thumbnail image of what the sheet looks like. If you hover on another sheet that's not already on the dashboard, then you'll be able to swap that sheet for one that is active or selected. Pretty neat. Continuing down the left side panel, we come to the object section. First, you'll see horizontal and vertical. These are layout containers which you can use to help you arrange objects on your dashboard. Horizontal means that objects placed inside can be organized horizontally, and vertical means that things placed inside can be organized vertically. We'll look at those a little more next week. Below vertical, you'll see a text box object. Using this, you can add any amount of text you would like to your dashboard. Just drag, drop and start typing. Below the text object, is an image object. This will allow you to easily add an image to your dashboard. Add up the next column, you'll find a webpage object. There are some pretty cool things you can do with this, but the most basic is to just embed a webpage into your dashboard by feeding a URL to the object. Below that, you can add a blank object. This is an easy way to add large amounts of padding if you don't want to use the padding controls, which we'll get into in just a minute. Alternatively, you can use a blank as a placeholder. Finally, in the object section you can add navigation buttons to your dashboard. This was a new and very welcome feature in version 2019.1, making it easy for you to add navigation between dashboards and sheets within your workbook. After you place a button, you can edit it using the drop-down menu to change the navigation target, as well as change the button type between image and text and set other formatting options to here as well. Very useful little guy. Below the object section you'll see a tiled versus floating toggle. This affects the behavior of new objects you add to your dashboard. If you have tiled selected, any objects you add will be snapped into containers and we'll fit into whatever empty spaces available. If you have floating selected, then your objects will not snap to any grid or containers. Floating offers flexibility of placement, but can be incredibly tricky or even infuriating if you need to resize your dashboard to make room for other stuff. You might wonder when it is best to use either one, but mostly I think it comes down to personal preference. Personally as a tyler myself, I don't know how people can stand to float everything, but some people do it. Teach their own. At the bottom of the left panel is a checkbox for show dashboard title. The default title is just whatever the sheet itself is named, and the same goes for worksheets. But you can always change that easily by double clicking on the object and editing the text there. On the layout panel this time, you can change, you guessed it, the layout of your dashboard objects. At the top, you can toggle whether to show that object's title if it has one, or whether you want it to be floating. Below that is the position and size. If the selected object is tiled, these options are grayed out. But it's still nice information to have sometimes. If the selected object is floating, you can actually use these boxes to change the size and position of an object. We can make it floating, and then we can use our arrow keys to nudge it. Below the size, you can add a border to your object and format it. Below that, you can change the background color and the opacity of your object. Next is the padding section, where you can add padding to the outside of your object or to the inside. Inner padding will appear inside a border, while outer padding will appear outside. I highly recommend you make good use of these options as a little bit of wide space around your dashboard objects actually makes it easier for a user to consume your dashboard. Let's go ahead and just remove this floating title here because we don't need it. Finally, at the bottom of the layout panel, you can see a hierarchy of objects on your dashboard. Sadly, you can't yet reorder objects from here, but if you're having layout trouble, this is the first place you should check to make sure your objects are doing what you think they should be doing. There's one more tiny but awesome thing I want to show you this lesson. All the way at the top of your screen, click the dashboard menu. If you like things to be placed pixel perfectly, you might enjoy the show grid option found here. Once you show the grid, you can use the grid options to change the spacing. Very useful for those extra design minded folks out there. Now that we've finished our tour of the dashboard screen, go ahead and close tableau, because we won't be needing this workbook again.
