Some Handy Shortcuts in Tableau

If you’re new to Tableau, you’re likely missing out on tons of helpful features. In this post, I’ll show some simple mouse and keyboard shortcuts that help speed up the chart creation and dashboarding processes. This will be especially useful to newer users, but experienced Tableau users might learn something new as well.

Manipulating Pills

“Pills,” or the fields making up your view, can be manipulated depending on how you click on them. When you’re bringing a new field into the view, you can hold down right click while you drag it to access more options that modify that field. When bringing in dimensions, you’ll get the following options, allowing you to choose the exact field, convert to an attribute, or use the MIN, MAX, Count, and Count Distinct aggregations. 

The GIF below shows what happens when you right click drag a measure (giving more aggregations to choose from) and a date (which allows you to select the date unit such as Year or Month as well as whether the date is discrete or continuous). For instance, you could choose whether to bring in the AVG of Sales or the SUM of Sales and whether to bring in the discrete month (the 12 months of the year on their own) or the continuous month (the month of each year as a continuous axis). 

You can also use Control + left click and drag to duplicate a pill. This is especially useful for when you want to add the same field to multiple parts of the Marks card (such as color and label) or when creating dual axis charts using the same field. As you can see below, you can also drag a pill to one of the empty gray areas (like below the Marks card) to remove it - it’s faster than right clicking and selecting remove. 

Another option within a pill is to remove its header by right clicking the pill and unticking Show Header. This will hide header / category names for dimensions (in this case hiding the column from the table entirely) and will hide axes for measures. This can be especially useful when you’re having a hard time finding the header / axis you want to delete on your sheet. Also within the menu that pops up upon right clicking a pill, you can tick or untick if you want this field to be included in your tooltip for the current sheet. 


Chart Options

The drop down option in the top menu is quite useful to select how your chart fills up the view (such as fitting width vs taking up the entire view), but you can also resize using Control + arrow keys. This can also be done on sheets within a dashboard. Keep in mind that on most keyboards Control + up arrow will stretch the chart downward and vice versa, which can be counterintuitive. 

The icon to the left of the sort options on the top menu can swap what’s currently on the columns and rows, which is quite useful to rotate your view or change your axes. Within Analysis > Table Layout > Advanced, you can also untick “show innermost level at bottom of view when there is a vertical axis” to swap column labels to the top. If there are multiple dimensions breaking up the view, it will move the most granular (detailed) level to the top.

When you want to create a combined axis chart (with multiple measures on the same axis), a quick way to do this is to hover the second field you want to bring in over the existing axis you’re combining it with. You should see an icon with two green bars and it will create the combined axis chart when you let go of the pill.



Dashboard Formatting

When bringing in elements into a dashboard, they can either be tiled (which snap together precisely) or floating. There is an option in the Objects pane in the bottom left to switch between these two options, but you can also hit the Shift key as you’re bringing in a new object to toggle between floating and tiled. 

Another handy key when working on a dashboard is T, which toggles between the Dashboard and Layout windows. Hitting the G key will show gridlines on your dashboard, which can be useful to check if everything’s lining up properly.

There are countless more tricks and shortcuts within Tableau, but I hope these have been helpful. If you want to look at some more examples, check out the following links from Tableau’s website:

https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/shortcut.htm 

https://www.tableau.com/blog/take-note-these-10-handy-tableau-shortcuts-57561 

Author:
Luke Bennett
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