Creating Story in Tableau

Creating Story in Tableau make your case more captivating by showing how facts are connected and how the decisions relate to outcomes. You can publish your story on the web or present it to an audience.

Each story point is based on a different view or dashboard. The entire story is based on the same visualization seen at different stages, with different filters and annotations.

How to create a story point?

1. Click on the New Story tab.

Tableau will open a new story as your starting point:

1. In the lower-left corner, choose a size for your story. Choose from one of the predefined sizes available, or set a custom size in pixels:

1. By default, the story gets its title from the sheet name. To edit it, right-click on the sheet tab, and choose Rename Sheet. If you are using Tableau Desktop, you can rename a story by double-clicking the title.
2. To start building your story, double-click on a sheet on the left to add it to a story point.

In Tableau Desktop, you can drag sheets into your story point.

When you are adding a sheet to a story point, the sheet remains connected to the original sheet. If you then modify the original sheet, your changes will automatically reflect the story points that use it.

3. Click on Add a caption to summarize the story point.

In Tableau Desktop, you can also highlight a key takeaway for your viewers by dragging a text object to the story worksheet and then typing a comment.

4. For further highlighting the main idea of this story point, you can also change a filter or sort on a field. Then you can save your changes by clicking Update on the story toolbar above the navigator box:

5. Add another story point by doing any one of the following:

• Click on Blank to use a fresh sheet for the next story point.

• Start customizing a story point and click on Save as New on the toolbar above the navigator box.

• Click on Duplicate to use the current story point as the basis for a new one.

How to explore layout options?

You can also refine the look of your story using the options on the Layout tab.

1. Click on the Layout tab.
2. Choose a navigator style that suits best to your story, and show or hide the next and previous arrows.

How to format a story?

Resize captions (Only for Tableau Desktop)

Sometimes the text present in one or more of your captions is too long to fit inside the navigator’s height. In this case, you can also re-size the captions vertically and horizontally.

1. In the navigator, select a caption.
2. Drag the border either left or right to resize the caption horizontally, down to resize vertically, or you can select a corner and drag diagonally to resize the caption both horizontally as well as vertically.

All the captions in the navigator update to the new size.

How to fit a dashboard to a story?

You can also fit a dashboard to the exact size of a story. For instance, if your story is exactly 800 by 600 pixels, you can shrink or expand a dashboard accordingly to fit inside that space.

Click on the Size drop-down menu and select the story you want the dashboard to fit inside.

How to format a story’s shading, title, and text objects (Only for Tableau Desktop)?

To open the Format Story pane, choose Format > Story.

Clear all formatting (Only for Tableau Desktop):

• For resetting a story to its default format settings, click on the Clear button at the bottom of the Format Story pane.
• For clearing a single format setting, right-click on the format setting you want to undo in the Format Story pane. Then select Clear.

For instance, if you want to clear the story title’s alignment, right-click Alignment in the Title section, and then select Clear.

How to delete a story point?

Click on the X in the toolbar above the point’s caption:

How to present your story?

1. In Tableau Desktop, click on the Presentation Mode button   on the toolbar. Or, you can publish the story to Tableau Online or Tableau Server and click the Full-Screen button in the browser’s upper-right corner.
2. To step through your story, click on the arrow to the right of the story points. Or, in Tableau Desktop, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard.
3. To exit Presentation or Full-Screen mode, press Esc.