by Peter Hajnal
As the title says, this blogpost is all about basic formatting tips. These are found in the format borders and format lines pane in Tableau. There's no universal way to format charts, as it depends on individual use cases, but I will show you how to generally format the various lines and borders within your chart. I will also show you how to save time by formatting your entire workbook.
I'll be using the good old Superstore dataset for this example. You can see that the Row Dividers are green, and the Column Dividers are purple. You can find these if you right click anywhere on your sheet and click on format.
Select the grid icon from the format pane on the left hand side, click on the Sheet section and scroll down until you see Row and Column Divider.
You can edit these by clicking the drop-down arrow. You can see there are options to change the colour, the type and the thickness of the line.
Next, we are going to remove the Grid Lines from the Bar Chart and make the background plain. Let's put Sales on Rows and Region on Columns. This time let's choose Rows in the Formatting Pane (3 horizontal lines, if you hover over the icon the title will show). Select the drop-down arrow next to Grid Lines, and choose None.
Next, select the Rows tab and in the drop-down arrow of Axis Rulers pick None. Then at the Columns Tab find and Axis Rulers and pick a slightly thicker line.
If you want to you can also lower the opacity to make it less intense.
If we want to apply these changes to other charts without clicking through the menus again and repeating what we did, right click on the sheet tab section at the bottom of the window. When the menu pops up, select copy formatting.
Then navigate to the other chart you would like to format. Right click and select paste formatting. Now, you should see the changes you made on the previous chart will be applied to the selected one.
This will save you a lot of time when formatting, and allow you to make a more visually appealing dashboard quicker.
Peter Hajnal DS|33