I have long sought to embed hi-res pictures in a dashboard without much success. The first try was a bit awkward. I even created a feature request asking for it. In the beginning, all I wanted was to create a picture slide show.

The epiphany took place a few days ago, that is, embedding a Slideshare widget in Tableau. Yes, that means, we can embed a PowerPoint in any Tableau dashboard via Slideshare, if that adds to the expressiveness of your data stories. How useful is this at all? You creative souls please tell me.

The steps are:

Step 1.Upload your PowerPoint to www.slideshare.net

Step 2.Get the url for the slideshare widget
-click the share button at the lower-left corner to view the embed code.
-copy the embed code to a notepad
-extract the url and add "https://" to it.
Step 3.Add a web object to your Tableau dashboard using the above url.

Here is an example embedding 3 PPTs. Click image to download the workbook.
To embed a photo album, insert photos to a PowerPoint file first. Then upload it to Slideshare.

Full Screen Control
After embedding the widget in Tableau, the fullscreen button lost its function. To make it up, I used an image object to cover the button and link the object to the full web browser view.

Security Control
BTW, there might be certain privacy or security concerns over uploading PPT to Slideshare.net. Slideshare provides some control over the content. Each set of the slides has a privacy settings you can edit and provide limited access to the content. One can generate a private link for the presentation. Basically, it hides the content from search engines. It is not perfect, but that's the best Slideshare can do.

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Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button. 

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

  • Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
  • Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

  • Go to the target dashboard
  • Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
  • Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
  • Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

  • Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager             
  • Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest. 
  • Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.  
  • The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help. 

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