Hey guys, in this video I'm gonna introduce you to Tableau's stories.
Stories are basically a bunch of worksheets that
are made up into a sequence that you design.
Each worksheet can have an entire dashboard on it,
a separate visualization, or really whatever you want.
The main important part about stories that's different than dashboards
is that the stories are ordered in a logical sequence, so that you can
present the data to your audience in a sequence that makes it most likely that
they will arrive at the same conclusion you did when they look at your data.
In this video, I'm not going to go into all the details about how you would format
every single part of a story point.
Much like in the dashboard video.
There are lots of resources out there and you can spend weeks and weeks and
weeks learning how to get all the formatting perfect and
learning all the bells and whistles.
Instead what I wanna do is I wanna give you an overview of how you'll get started
using story points and show you how you can use story points for
presentations to technical teams, if you need them.
At the end, I'll give you some inspiration for these stories, or for
making some beautiful stories,
by showing you some of the storypoints being published on the web.
Please go to your Tableau workbook and go down to the corner, and
instead of clicking new worksheet or new dashboard,
click the icon all the way to the right that looks like a book, New Story.
When you click that, you'll see that the workspace looks very similar to
the workspace we saw for dashboards.
The thing that's missing are containers, but
the thing that's the same are that up here on the left,
we see all of the different worksheets that we have in our workbook.
We also see that you can change the size of the storypoint, or the story,
down here.
Just like before, we can choose
a variety of different sizes depending on how we intend on publishing it.
We'll choose laptop this time.
So the way the story is going to work is that you're going to have one
visualization per story point.
If you want to have multiple visualizations,
you're going to have to do it via a dashboard.
So you can drop a dashboard into a story point, but
that's the only way that you could put multiple different worksheets together.
Once you've made a story point, you're going to label it, and
then you're going to make another story point that comes right after it.
So what you're going to end up with is a sequence of these captions,
each associated with its own story point.
So imagine that you wanted to share the results of your data
analysis with either your partner or your friend to explain to them why you want to
move to a certain place for a new job.
So your first story point might be, I took into consideration
whether visa class would
affect my salary.
And then you can put your visa class analysis here.
Then, you can make a new blank point, and you could say,
I also looked at whether my salary would likely
increase in the future, or something like that.
And then you can put your best fit lines over time.
You could start by saying, at first
I thought I was going to move to California, say.
And then you might put your jobs by state.
Visualization there, and in the last one you'd say,
but now I want to move to I don't remember,
let's try Wyoming.
Now you can put your dashboard, your entire dashboard in this storypoint.
And the important part to see here is just like in your dashboard,
you can make these storypoints interactive.
So they will work in exactly the same way
as they did when you were making dashboards.
The difference between stories and dashboards is that whatever filters or
interactions you do in this story point,
it won't affect what happens in these other story points.
So that makes it easier for people to be able play around and for
you to still be in control of the narrative.
This also can be useful for presentations, because if your giving a presentation to
a technical team, they can ask you questions about the data, and you can show
them by actually clicking on different interactive parts of your visualization.
But when they're done asking their questions, you can then go back and
zoom back out to the big picture that you intended on showing them
with your data story.
So, that's one of the main ways I think that storypoints are being used now.
As we'll talk about in the next couple of weeks, storypoints can also just be
useful for organizing your presentation that you're going to make when you
are going to give the results of your analysis to a see suite or to your bosses.
We'll hear more about that in following weeks.
So just like other aspects of Tableau, you can always change the story titles,
you can change the font color and the justification and all that kind of stuff.
So you should definitely explore that.
The one thing you should know about is that you can add descriptions to each
story point.
So over here you can click on this description box, and
double click it and this will allow you to enter text boxes.
So you could say something like, click on a state,
to see what companies offer the best salaries.
And then that gives you a text box that you can put and move wherever you want.
And you can either float it, you can have it go underneath things,
all the typical kinds of formatting options.
So one thing that would be useful to show you is
what it would look like if you're to present this story.
So go ahead and press on presentation mode, and
you can see now how it would look if you were giving this story to your data team.
You don't see all the borders on the outside, you just see the data.
And you can still interact with it just as if you were working in Tableau itself.
Hopefully this gives you a flavor of what stories in Tableau can do for you.
The main thing I'd like you to remember is something I mentioned before but
I'll reiterate again.
This gives you a good way for figuring out what order of your data insights
would be useful for communicating to people your conclusion of your data story.
We'll hear more about that next week, but this will be a good tool to keep in mind.
To finish up, I thought I'd give you a little inspiration for how complicated and
beautiful some of these data stories can be.
So these data stories were made with Tableau's data
story functionality and they were published online.
So you can see this is one
about the influence Russia has over different parts of Europe.
And you can see that they have these text boxes that you saw how to make.
They have these different types of visualizations that have tool tips.
Again, tool tips they have quite a lot of text in these.
Almost all the story boards I've seen published do have a lot of text.
And you can click on things and highlight them just like you would in Tableau.
Here's another example.
Here's another pretty one.
This is a good example of something that is, again, way too much data for
you to take in at once, but you can play around with it if you want to.
And you can see the legends here try to give the story that the author
is trying to convey, and this was actually published by CNBC.
One of the things I alluded to a couple times, and
that you might have noticed as I clicked through the storypoints that were
published on the web, is that although they are beautiful and
really enjoyable to interact with, it's pretty hard to figure out
what the take home message of each individual visualization is.
You usually have to read the full paragraph to figure out what they mean,
and you might even have to do more than that.
You might have to click around and infer some of the story yourself.
So one of the reasons that's the case is because there's a lot of data
on these graphs.
The other reason is because there's a lot of text.
And I mention this because next week we're going to learn some principles about how I
make very clear take home messages from singular graphs on singular slides.
You'll see that many of the principles suggest doing the opposite
of what you see on these beautiful story points and
beautiful stories we see published on the web.
So I hope you're excited to learn more about that,
because it will make you a very powerful presenter in business settings.
But in the meantime, please enjoy these beautiful,
beautiful story points that you can find on the web.
And we'll give you some more links with the course website so
that you can see even more of them.