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You've already created your vizzes and sketched the general layout of your dashboard. You click the icon to create a new dashboard in Tableau. Now what?
- Delete the phone layout.
Why? When you create a new dashboard, Tableau will automatically generate a layout with the same elements to fit a phone screen. However, it's not likely to do justice to the formatting you're carefully crafting. If you delete this layout, then your dashboard will show up the same no matter what device it's being viewed on, which will look better than the default phone layout. - Set the size of the dashboard.
Why? This ensures you know how much space you're working with and know how your dashboard will show up across devices. - Add your master container as a floating container. Set its position to (0,0) and set its size to the same size as your dashboard.
Why? Using a floating container as your master container helps prevent problems when resizing the nested containers and helps avoid Tableau automatically creating tiled containers all willy-nilly. - Drag a "blank" into the master container and give it a noticeable background color.
Why? Filling the unused space with a noticeable blank helps you see where you're working and accurately place new containers and elements as you go along. You can continually move the blank into your new containers. The noticeable color also reminds you to delete it at the end.
Blanks also help you resize elements without changing the size of other existing elements: Pin the size of your dashboard elements when you're happy with them, and make sure the size of the blanks is unpinned. The blanks will expand or shrink as needed and leave your other elements fixed.
For a useful take on containers and blanks, check out Curtis Harris' YouTube video "Things I Know About Tableau Layout Containers"
Here are a few other tips to keep in mind as you build your dashboard:
- Use text boxes as placeholders. While building out your container structure, you can put text boxes in the containers to remind you which charts you want there.
- Use grabbers to your benefit. These aren't just useful for moving your dashboard elements around. They carry information and help navigate your container hierarchy. Objects like blanks, text boxes, and sheets have grey grabbers while containers have blue grabbers. Double clicking the grabber of a selected element selects the next container up in the hierarchy.
- Unpin width/height to expand an element. Tableau will keep a bit of unused space below and to the side of your empty containers. Once you fill the containers with viz sheets, Tableau will allow them to expand into the unused space. To achieve this, once you've deleted any extra blanks, pin the size of everything you want to stay the same and then unpin the size of the containers you want to expand.