Telling a Story in Tableau

This short post is around trying to create an article like structure with in-line visualizations all within Tableau. Inspiration for this pulls from sites like 538 and polygraph as well as several authors from the Tableau Public community (like the one noted below, this recent VotD).

There have been many examples across the Tableau Public community showing the data storytelling capabilities of Tableau. These include leveraging additional JS libraries (via API/embed) like reveal.js (thank you Jeff Shaffer!), but others that caught my eye recently where examples of building out an entire story in a long form Tableau dashboard. Here is one example that Rob Radburn posted recently that got me thinking. Note: there are several others, this one by Rob is just a single recent example. 

I decided to see just how much work it is to do something like this, all within Tableau. The answer... not all that much. Like every tool, Tableau makes some hard things easy and some easy things hard. This type of visualization is a great example of the former and demonstrates the creativity that Tableau can empower it's Desktop users with. The viz story is just a simple collection of visualization sheets and text boxes, you can download the workbook to see how I went about laying out the story. The viz below is best viewed in landscape, hope you like it!