How to Create a Tableau Dashboard to Track Work Hours?

4 min readAug 20, 2022

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a dashboard to track how many hours did an employee work on a project. This could be used by the manager or supervisor of your employees to track their time.

This challenge is from Erica Hughes for week 30 of #WOW2022.

Solution:

From the requirements, I gather that I need to create a heatmap and a bar chart. Also, I need to make it possible for the user to select a range. All other requirements fall into these three major requirements.

First thing first, Connect to your data source. You can get the data here.

Parameters allow users to enter different types of information into your dashboard without creating a new field for each possible input.

I created three parameters — two date parameters (start date & end date) to select the date range and one Date Level parameter to allow the user to choose default, days, weeks, or months.

Now that parameters are in place, let’s create the required calculated fields.

Create a calculated field to calculate the number of selected days.

As per requirements, the default view has three different view options — day, week, and month. The following calculation creates three different date levels.

I created a calculation for determining date levels. It will allow for changing the date level by the user.

The default date level has three sub-levels, and each one of those requires its Date labels.

To format time as Hour + minutes.

A calculated field to filter for the selected date range.

Drag “Filter — Date Range” and “Project” to the filter pane. Add both filters to contexts. You can learn about Tableau’s order of operation here.
To add filters to context, right-click the filter and select “Add to context.”

Heatmap:

Drag “Selected Date Level” & “Label — Date Level” to columns. Also, drag “employee name” to rows. You’ll have something like this.

I also need to sort this chart by Total hours in descending order.

To do that, I created a new calculated field, “Sort — Desc.” It calculates the sum of hours worked for each row — each employee. Drag this field to rows before employees.