Make your dashboard flexible with component widgets
Today I want to introduce a new (revolutionary) feature we’ve built in Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics); it’s called Dashboard Components.
What is it? Essentially, it’s a container with pages that allows you to quickly create and reuse dynamic areas of a dashboard.
Why is this awesome you ask? First, because who doesn’t love a new widget! Second, because who wouldn’t want to easily maintain and reuse their dashboard content? That’s right. With dashboard components, you’ll be able to create “mini dashboard” widgets that are accessible across your apps and dashboards. And best of all, dashboard components make it easy to maintain dashboards in one central location.
There are two main use cases we want to solve with dashboard components;
- Reusability and maintainability – what if you could build your widgets once and reuse them across multiple dashboards
!? - Easily (through Clicks not Code) build interactive dashboards; we love creating those rich interactions using pages and we know you do too, and with components, we’re making it even easier!
So let’s look at this into more details.
Reusability
It’s a fair assumption to say that when we build dashboards, we often end up reusing the same colors, style, branding, and set of widget across all of them.
A good example of this is the filter header present in many dashboards. It’s often the same or very similar. With dashboard components, you’ll be able to save part of your dashboard as a set of widgets contained in this mini dashboard (aka component) and reuse it freely in any of your dashboards.
Moreover, when you need to update that filter header to add a new filter for a new product line that was recently added; well guess what..? No more tracking down every dashboard that needs to be updated. Now you can just update that centralized component, and every dashboard using it will have the latest version of the filter, et voilà!
Another use case for this is those key metrics or KPIs that are specific to your company and that appear in multiple dashboards. Once in awhile, they need to be updated, which means updating each and every one of the dashboards with the KPIs. With dashboard components, you’ll be able to edit it once, and all the dashboards that have it will be updated.
Better yet, dashboard components promote sharing of resources and collaboration across teams and dashboard authors while helping everyone fast start their dashboard building journey.
More pages for Interactive Dashboards!
When dashboard pages became available, we wanted to leverage them as dashboard extensions, allowing builders to create a collection of dashboards linked as pages.
After we released dashboard pages, we learned that dashboard authors leverage pages to create hide/reveal interactions, where, essentially, one page shows an “on” state, and one page shows the “off” state. The issue here is that those interactions have a high page cost. For every interaction, you need two pages. Very quickly, dashboard authors started running out of pages, limiting highly interactive dashboards.
With dashboard components, this shouldn’t be an issue. Each dynamic area of a dashboard can now be contained within this new widget and its pages. This makes it easier to manage since the dynamic interaction is localized to the container widget, meaning there won’t be an exponential explosion of pages across the dashboard. Also, page limits are no longer an issue, since pages are now tabs/states of the new container widget, not the dashboard.
Pilot Information
In Winter ’21, this feature is available as an open pilot feature. This means you’ll need to reach out to your AE’s or SE’s to request access to this pilot program. Because it is a pilot feature, we are still working on it, improving it, and therefore it will have some limitations. We are currently conducting research with some of our customers to understand what you love and what we can improve.
If you’re interested in trying out this new feature, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your AEs. We are currently working on the GA version that we are hoping to deliver in upcoming releases.
Lastly, dashboard components are part of a bigger initiative where we are thinking about bringing more content to Tableau CRM. Think lightning web elements and more. This whole set of features opens up new doors for dashboard authoring and we are hoping you’re as excited as we are. Stay tuned!
*Forward-looking statement
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