This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.
Disclaimer: I use Tableau Desktop for 99% of my workbooks.
I have been thinking lately about being a more efficient developer with my dashboards, which goes hand-in-hand with having workbook performance front-of-mind. Along those lines, this blog post is a collection of tips and tricks that I’ve picked up in the past year or two, including a few shortcuts that might save you time. Hopefully, there’s a little something for everyone, so I hope you enjoy it.
1. LODs Made Easy
Simply select your data field from the Measures area, hold down “Ctrl,” and drag it on top of a dimension. Tableau creates a new Fixed LOD calculated field that you can use immediately as its own measure. It takes more time for you to read this than it does to generate four or five of these Fixed LODs right now in your workbook you may have open.
Here’s why I chose this one. I am usually pretty certain that in my data, I’ll need to have a few Fixed LODs where I’m locking my aggregated data to a single dimension field. This might be Sum of Sales locked to Country, or Sum of Profit locked to Category. The trouble that I get into is with the syntax that is required to support a LOD, namely the required curly brackets. First, you have to find the “{“ or the “}” on your keyboard, and then you have to go and locate the front portion of the text in your calculated field and insert the open curly bracket, and then eventually doing the same to finish the calculation with a closed curly bracket at the end. Quick LODs for the win!
Warning: Make sure you know what you’re doing when it comes to LODs, as you won’t always need a LOD to accomplish your desired view’s outcome. The more you understand the granularity of your views (think of the number of marks showing in your workspace), the more you’ll be able to lean into the default aggregations of fields in order to keep your workbook optimized for performance.
Bonus:
Related to above: you can use “Ctrl” + “Home” to jump to the front of your calculated field text or “Ctrl” + “End” to jump to the last character of your calculated field, which is a lot easier than sometimes trying to do a point and click to insert your cursor’s position.
2. Measure Names
If you’re not a fan of the way your Measures are named in a View where Measure Names and Measure Values fields are required, then just use a scratch sheet, drag important metrics directly into the view and use the Measure Names field (from the Rows shelf in this example) to alias out all of your Measures “names.” This is a much better way to manage the names when you need more than one metric in a view, i.e. crosstab or multiple-metric table:
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3. Maps
Maps (if you don’t use geographic data, then feel free to skip). Oftentimes, when I’m looking at a map in Tableau, there can be some inherent Tableau behaviors that I’d like to have more control over. The few that stand out most are removing unnecessary background details, fixing the map and limiting the ability to zoom/search.
-Washout: With a 100% washout, your map will look much better on a dashboard. Remember, white space on a dashboard allows for the eyes to rest as a user navigates all of the visual elements and data. This can be done by using the Map Menu and choosing Background Layers (move slider from 0% washout to 100%):
Locking the map: as you begin to filter, you’ll notice that Tableau likes to bring the filtered location to the foreground, removing the other geographic details. While sometimes this is the intended behavior I want, most of the time I just want to keep the map itself fixed. Before disabling the map options, as suggested next, be sure to select the “Fix” map from the map controls first:
-Removing Zoom/Search: Just get rid of any extra end-user functionality with maps, so that users can’t accidentally get stuck. To do this, you will simply uncheck all of the selection options from the Map Menu to Map options controls:
4. Separate Color Legends
If you have a multiple-metric table where Measure Names and Measure Values fields are present in order to support that type of view, you can use these fields to your advantage. With Measure Names, you can support multiple KPIs with the names of the fields sitting right next to the values they represent in the table. More importantly, if you have a broader cross tab and want to support conditional formatting for each of the fields individually, Tableau gives you this option by using Measure Values field onto the Color cards in the Marks card area. Once Measure Values is in Color, you can choose the option that says use Separate Color legends:
Bonus:
Related to above, let’s say for one of the metrics, you want to have no color represented beyond the numbers themselves remaining black, or if you push the marks to be represented as Square and want to have no highlight (white). This can be done through a custom diverging color palette that goes from White to White or Black to Black, but the key is to push the Steps down to 2 from the edit colors menu for the desired metric’s color legend:
5. Copy Formatting
Tableau will usually remember the colors you use to represent members that make up a dimension field, should you decide not to set the default properties for the field with your assigned colors from the data pane (which I recommend you do instead). But let’s say you have some additional sheet formatting such as background color, custom header/pane font type or even some basic header colors/bold text in use, and want to mirror those from an already produced sheet? If you choose the original sheet’s properties and select the option to Copy Formatting, then go to the new sheet and choose Paste Formatting option, that will generate all of your formatting changes in one big swoop without having to individually adjust all of the same options one by one:
Bonus: If you just want to copy some already formatted text, go open the text box (title, label, etc.) where the formatted text is exactly how you want, write out a few characters such as “Steal this”, copy that text (then delete it), and go to your new sheet/desired text box, paste the text, remove previously formatted fields, reinsert the original fields after the pasted text, and this will generate your formatted text without the extra points and clicks.
6. Copy Dashboard Templates
There are lots of use-cases for copying a dashboard, but for me it’s all about saving time. I’ll create a workbook with a bunch of already styled and formatted dashboards that I will make available for my end users. They can download my workbook, “Copy” a dashboard template they want to use, paste it directly into their own workbook and simply swap out the placeholders for their own sheets. I’ll have lots of different dashboard layouts available for them to choose from, using blank or text objects as the placeholders. This helps to achieve efficiency and production-ready work.
7. Searching for Data
Searching for an item in a dimension field list isn’t always an easy task in Tableau. Most often, users will click on the dimension from the data pane and choose “Describe” to see a glimpse of some of the members that make up that field. That snapshot only offers the first 20, so then you move to creating a new sheet and putting the dimension onto Rows and start scrolling alphabetically. While that is perfectly fine, you might be able to save yourself some time by duplicating a sheet where the dimension is already in use, showing the dimension as a filter, and then using the Multi-value “Custom List” filter to type and search for an item. You could also use the “Wildcard,” which is even a tick faster in identifying a specific member from a list. This is useful for finding “Waldo” (or “Hon” in my example below). P.S. If you choose “Show Filter” for a field in your view that has a high cardinality, then Tableau will default to the Multi-value “Custom List” filter by default.
8. Use Captains as a Color Legend
Using Captions to create your own custom Color Legend may not be something that anyone has pointed out to you yet, so let me be the first. By the way, captions look great on a dashboard, if someone hasn’t informed you of that yet. Second, this gives the color legend its own place inside of your sheet, so it doesn’t get lost in a sea of Title text above the sheet. And, please, don’t try floating the default color legend somewhere close to the sheet in a dashboard because that’s not a good way to handle ongoing maintenance should changes need to be made or specific dashboard size ranges that need to be supported:
9. Use Unicode or UTF8 Characters
These will literally help shout out the trends or insights that you want to shine a light on. Colors are a great first step in bringing the data story to life, but Unicode characters will help to make things even more obvious. As a means of double-encoding your insights, you’ll also ensure that you won’t accidentally be a barrier to someone needing questions answered from your visuals, but maybe they have color blindness or suffer from low-vision or just need some extra handholding or guidance. A few of the most common characters include ▼, + , ✓ , ✘ , – , ▲, ☛ , ⟳ , ☜ , , → , ← , among others. You might find out my favorite Unicode character by going to my Tableau Public profile page and seeing my very first Iron Viz submission (“So Much Love in the World”).
Bonus: If you are working on a Windows machine, you may have a “Character Map” already available to use for a list of all of these helpful characters. The great part is you can get to the Character Map list without needing access to the Internet. I like working in offline mode, sometimes, so people can’t see my green circle in Slack as being “available.”
10. Customize your Positive, Negative and Zero Values
From the Data Pane, make sure you set your default currency, number or percentages, which will save you formatting them from each sheet. But don’t forget about all of the Custom options that you can use to uniquely show “positive” values versus “negative” numbers, or even how results that are “zero” get shown. In my example, I have gone into my Profit Ratio field from the data pane, rounded to “percentage” with no decimals, and then went to the Custom option immediately below percentage to have it display positive numbers with a “+” in front of the value, negative numbers with a “-” and a “▼” arrow, and zero as text that says “Neither.”
11. Right-Click Drag Fields for a Drop Menu
It’s always more performant to have fewer total fields for Tableau to handle when computing a visualization or collection of sheets on a dashboard. In that vain, when you need to get a count of dimension field, you can right-click drag the original field from the data pane onto Rows, Columns or the Marks card area to get Drop Field options. These include the option to treat the dimension as is using its “Abc” behavior, or to convert it to a measure as a count or count distinct instead. Remember, count is a more performant, but I realize you will sometimes have to use count distinct.
Bonus: If you use sets, you can right-click drag your set field onto Filters, and you’ll get an option for In/Out/All filter. By default, a set would have to be dropped into a calculated field to get the filter options for “In” or “Out” or “All.” But, using the right-click drag trick, will get to that same filter option, but with one less field for Tableau to maintain or parse through.
12. Show Sheet Sorter
And last, but certainly not least, my favorite way to organize my sheets, refresh all of my tiles or color-encode my related sheets that I’m prepping for a dashboard. This can all be done from the Show Sheet Sorter Menu. It’s way, way down at the bottom right of the Tableau Workbook. You’ll notice a filled in Square, which is called the Show Tabs menu. Incidentally, the Show Tabs Menu is the default, because it most resembles Excel navigation. But, opening up the 3 x 3 square view, called Show Sheet Sorter, really offers a more expansive way to look at all the contents of your workbook and organize accordingly.
Again, my hope is that maybe, just maybe, some of this collective content might be useful toward your day-to-day work while also helping you find new ways to make use of Tableau. Good luck!
