Yesterday and today I spent some time working on making a Tableau dashboard that is similar to the PowerBI report tabs.

For this report, I signed up for Tableau Public, which allows embedding maps/visuals as an iframe, just as I do the Power BI Reports.  As with anything used for the first time, it feels a bit awkward and clunky as I find the controls and general concept of how it works for putting reports together.

The map would look better if I was using the MapBox tool for Tableau, which I use in PowerBI. It would likely end up a same/same comparison for the mapping  visual.

The dashboards seem to be different, in that Tableau allows one visual per report tab, while PowerBI allows multiple visuals per tab.  Then Tableau combines multiple tab graphs to a dashboard that equates to one PowerBI tab.  PowerBI creates links from the multiple report or multiple tab graphs to one dashboard.  This preliminary review of dashboard functionality could be a rookie misunderstanding.

Using graphs as filters for other graphs isn’t completely sorted out yet.  Using the bar graph by country code doesn’t make the map visual focus on the country selected…  I’m not sure if this is missing functionality or a more in depth understanding needed in managing report elements so far.  I’ll be working on making head to head comparisons between the two applications for upcoming reports to see which visuals better.  It certainly can’t hurt to gain a skill with another software.

If the embed isn’t working, the report is located here: jcbooth visual

Categories: Analytics