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Hypothetically, let’s say your month-over-month sales increased significantly. What drove that increase in sales? And what might have detracted from (offset) those increased sales? Setting up drivers in your Data Story can answer those questions.

In Data Stories, drivers contribute toward a total value. Offseters detract from a total value. You’ll find insights about drivers and offsetters in discrete and continuous stories. And these insights make it easy to understand exactly what's going on in the data and why.

Set dimension drivers

1. Add a Tableau Data Story to a Dashboard.
2. From your dashboard, click the Settings icon at the top-left corner of your Data Story object.
3. In the Data Story dialog box, click the Drivers tab.
4. From the Dimension Drivers section, select the type of driver that has the greatest impact on your analysis:
   For Count, set the maximum number of contributors and offsetters.
   For Individual %, set thresholds for writing about individual contributors and offsetters.
   For Cumulative %, set thresholds for writing about contributors and offsetters based on their collective value.
5. Click Save.

Understand dimension driver types

• Count specifies the number of entities (contributors and offsetters) called out in your story. For example, use Count to see the top three contributors and offsetters in your data.
• Individual % sets a threshold, and values higher than that threshold are included in your story. For example, use Individual % to specify that you want to write about only entities that represent more than 5% of the total value.
• Cumulative % sets a percentage threshold of the total value that included entities collectively account for. For example, use Cumulative % to specify that you want to write about the entities that contributed to at least 90% of that total value. In this example, entities are written about in order of magnitude until the cumulative value of those entities account for 90% of the total value.

Use secondary contributors

To use secondary contributors, you must have a second dimension that isn’t time. When you use secondary contributors, each driver that is written about also has details about and drivers for its secondary contributor. For example, if you are analyzing store sales, a secondary contributor would be a class within a department. Secondary contributors allow for deeper analysis. But secondary contributors can also contain a lot of information to fit into a single sentence in your story.

Set metric drivers

For measures that are composed of other subcategory measures, driver analysis can explain the impact that each measure had on the top-level value. For example, material costs and operating costs contribute to total cost.

To use metric drivers, you must have multiple measures for metric analysis. Then, you can specify the relationships between each measure.

1. Add a Tableau Data Story to a Dashboard.
2. From your dashboard, click the Settings icon at the top-left corner of your Data Story object.
3. In the Data Story dialog box, click the Drivers tab.
4. From the Metric Drivers section, first choose the measure that is a subcategory of another measure.
5. Then, choose the measure that is the primary category.
6. Click Save.

Tip: The verbosity setting also applies to drivers. By changing your story’s verbosity setting, you can adjust the way insights are written. If you use high verbosity, then you'll see more information in parentheses. If you use low verbosity, then you’ll get a more concisely written insight about your drivers. For more information, see Configure Tableau Data Story Settings: Narrative.