Lesson 12 Free Preview: Building a Tableau Conference 21 Session Browser
With TC21 just around the corner this special lesson shows you how to build a session browser, the techniques learned can be applied to many other projects too, read on for a free preview.
For this weeks Tableau Academy project we take you through how you can build the Tableau Conference 2021 session browser above. This project allows users to select a region and then a date and then plots out all the conference sessions that meet the criteria.
Users can then click any of the sessions to book onto them or add them to their conference planner.
These techniques can be used in a variety of projects where you want to display a list of options or results in a grid format like above, they can also be used to create a menu/contents page or even as a portal type page to be able to select and drill down into specific items.
Below you can find a link to the full lesson, the final solution on Tableau Public and a snippet of one of the steps from the lesson, enjoy!
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👉 Finally, you can view the final solution over on Tableau Public here.
Lesson Preview - Check out a free snippet from this weeks lesson:
Step 2.3 - Apply formatting to match Tableau Conference branding
At the moment our chart looks pretty uninspiring, in this step we’re going to set some formatting to match the TC brand colours and then add some additional design elements to make it stand out a bit more.
First up we’re going to set the background colours of the chart using the same blue that TC used.
Click Format from the top menu and then Shading (or use the shortcut Alt, then o, then s).
On the Format Shading pane that has appeared click the drop down box next to Worksheet.
Click More colours… and on the box that appears enter #2d3651 into the HTML: box near the bottom right then press OK.
Note: We’ve already got the TC branding colours for you, if you wanted to find them yourself simply make sure you have a browser window open on the TC web page, when you click More colours… there’s a button to Pick Screen Colour, simply click this and then click on the colour on the web page you want to get and Tableau will return the code for you.
You can do this with anything on your screen and is a great way of picking colours from images or elements in order to create a nice consistent design.
Under Row Banding click the drop down next to Pane and this time set the colour to be #182039.
Do the same for the Header option under Row Banding too.
While you’ve got the format menu open click the Borders icon at the top and set the borders to None under each section.
Now click the Lines icon at the top and make sure the Grid Lines and Zero Lines are set to None (if they still appear check the Rows and Columns tab as well).
Close the Format pane.
Now we’ve changed the colour to a darker blue it’s hard to see the text, let’s set it to a much lighter colour so we can see it!
Click the Colour card under Marks and select a white or really light grey colour.
Right click anywhere in the Vertical Axis which shows the start times and click Format.
Click the drop down box next to Font in the Default section and change the colour to a light grey or white colour as well then close the format menu.
Now we’ve removed the borders and lines it’s quite hard to tell where the cell for each session starts and ends, we’re going to add a coloured pill to the left of each to highlight it and also show which category the session falls under.
To do this we’re going to use a custom shape that we’ve created for this project, make sure you’ve downloaded the shape file and folders from that start of the lesson as you’re going to need them now.
On your computer navigate to the 2 shape folders you downloaded earlier (they should be called Custom Shapes and Geographies).
Copy both the folders (and the files within them) and then navigate to the My Tableau Repository folder on your computer (by default this should be in your Documents folder but you may have changed it when you installed Tableau, you should be able to find it pretty easily by just doing a search).
Click the Shapes folder within your My Tableau Repository folder and paste the two folders above into here.
Go back to Tableau and double click anywhere on the Columns shelf to create another inline calculation.
This time type in 0.1 and press enter.
Notice now that there are three options under your Marks cards now, this is because we’ve added an additional chart so you can now add/remove elements from both at once using the All drop down or from each of the separate charts using either the SUM(2.5) or SUM(0.1) drop downs.
Click the green SUM(0.1) pill that you just created in the columns shelf.
Click the Dual Axis option which will then overlay one chart on top of the other.
Right click either of the Horizontal Axis and click Synchronise Axis, this will make sure the same range is used on both charts.
At the moment both our charts are showing the same thing so we need to edit them to put what we want on each.
Under the Marks make sure the All section is expanded.
Drag Measure Names off the colour option to remove it.
Click the SUM(0.1) option and make sure that section is expanded now.
Change the Text dropdown to Shape as we want to make this a shape chart.
Drag Topic from the text card and drop it onto the Detail card (we still want the topic so that our shapes appear in the right column but we don’t want it repeated on the label).
Click the Shape card and the More shapes… option.
Click the Reload Shapes button so that it recognises the shapes you added earlier.
Click the drop down menu under Select Shape Palette that says Default and you should see the Custom Shapes folder you added, click this and then click the first pill (the thickest one) as that’s what we want to use for all items and then click OK.
Click the Size card and drag the slider to the middle notch.
Drag the Category field from the data pane and drop it onto the Colour card.
Click the Colour card and then the Edit Colours… button.
Click the drop down under Select Colour Palette, scroll down and select Hue Circle then click the Assign Pallette button, this will now automatically assign a colour from that palette to each category.
You may notice that the colour pills only appear in the first column, that’s because we’ve added a new dimension (category) so we need to tell Tableau to also consider this when calculating the Position for the column.
Click the blue Position pill in the Columns shelf.
Click Edit Table Calculation…
Tick Category in the check list and then close the window.
We’ve now got a coloured pill to the left of every cell indicating what the session category is. Notice that some of the session topics are too big to fit within the cells? In the next step we’re going to fix that and add some additional information and tooltips to the table to complete this part of the lesson.
Step 2.3 Screen Recording (note: the videos in this lesson have no voice over):
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Thanks,
Alan @ Tableau Academy