I see a lot of people on the Tableau Community Forums, Reddit, Discord, Stack Overflow (and probably a few others that I frequent) posting screenshots that don’t really provide enough information, so I thought I’d post about it to help everyone.
TL;DR – make sure you include the entire screen, but redact parts where necessary
I understand the reply is usually “I can’t reveal my data”, so I’ll use the standard Superstore workbook to explain the problem …
This is the classic “I don’t want to show my data”, but it doesn’t actually show enough – I can’t see anything that was used to create the sheet. I can only see that Consumer (whatever that is) some how as 2 values that range from 0 to 60something. So the graph looks good, but just doesn’t tell me much at all.
OK, so the same sheet but now I can see the Rows and Columns shelves, so I can clearly see that the data is sum of Sales, the Columns (x-axis) are months of Order Date) and Consumer is one (of many?) values of Segment.
OK, I changed the height of the screenshot a bit – I had to. On the left I can now see the Pages shelf (nothing going on there), Filters shelf (WOW, a lot of important information there) and the Marks card (again a wealth of information here)
Filters Shelf – a guide for everything in Tableau is “Fields in italics are automatically created by Tableau” and although an action filter isn’t strictly a field, it works the same way. I can also see that some filters are shared with other sheets (the icons on the left) and don’t forget the Order of Operations when you’re looking at Filters. Tableau has official documentation, but I often use Jim Dehner’s version when I’m teaching because it’s more detailed.
Marks Card – There’s also a lot to look at here – formatting, colours, tooltips, etc. If there are multiple measures used in the sheet there could be multiple cards as well – it depends on the graph that you are creating.
That’s it, I can see EXACTLY how the graph has been created by showing the Rows, Columns and Filters shelves and the Marks Card. I still don’
(Almost) the ultimate screenshot – now I can see the Data Pane and maybe I’m bordering on giving away too much information. I can now see all the data sources (there’s 3), they are live sources (because it’s a single cylinder) and there isn’t any blending (there’s a blue check, but no orange check). I can see some of the dimensions and measures in the data source and some of the parameters (obviously not “all” because there’s scroll bars).
I can see the data types of the dimensions and measures along with which ones are calculated.
I can see EVERYTHING on this full-screen screenshot. But do you want to show the workbook name (that might reveal the Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud connection)?, I can also see some of the other sheets & dashboards in the workbook and towards the bottom right I might be able to see your username if you’re logged in.
So I hope that helps you, which ultimately helps me (and all the other volunteers offering free help). Please include as much information in your screenshot, remember to redact any confidential information (but make it obvious) and realise that I might still ask for some sample/dummy data or a packaged workbook as well.
