Here are 3 tips for Tableau users that I wished I knew earlier, so that much time and effort could have been saved. Navigating around software is not easy, I am sure the majority of the Microsoft Office users still learn new things from time to time despite them being around for so long. Hence, even if you may know the tips below, I do hope that you can help spread them to fellow Tableau users.
1. Changing the Screen Resolution to 100% While Working on Tableau
Working on the laptop, there are times when I have uploaded a viz to Tableau Public or Server and then come to realise that the viz does not look the way it does while I am working on it in the Tableau app. I can see the words being cut off, the charts looking a bit off, and the floating elements being off their supposed spots. To solve this, I have many times gone into Tableau Public or Server to edit the vizzes. However, there is no need to make the process so tedious as I have found out later. All I have needed to do is to change my screen resolution to 100%. To do it, please check out the links here for Windows and Mac. This will help to ensure that the vizzes look as close as possible to Tableau when the vizzes are published on Tableau Public or Server. I found this tip while joining a Tableau competition at work in which one of the conditions is to have the vizzes be able to view at 100% screen resolution.
2. Shortcuts to Choose Colour Quickly in Tableau
Despite the technique probably being an obvious one to digital natives or long-time Paint users, do you know that you can choose the colour by clicking on the coloured square of the item that you will like to change? I have found out about this on Twitter. Some experienced users have not realised it too! I am not sure I can this is the post that has made me realise this shortcut, but here are the Tweets describing it:
New blog post | Set colours for Measure Names
— Simon Beaumont (@SimonBeaumont04) March 9, 2019
How have I only just found this out? In my latest post, I share how you can double click the colour next to a Measure Name to access the @tableau 'Select a Colour' dialogue box. Definite time saver!https://t.co/NIYDZDpJwI pic.twitter.com/BCJp6luegu
A bonus tip on Twitter regarding choosing colours:
Fun Tableau thing I just learned (with admittedly limited use cases) You can ctrl+click in the colour widget to assign a palette to a subsection of your data #tableau #dataviz pic.twitter.com/6S9jXY181J
— Ray (@RayDoesData) February 11, 2021
3. Pivot Function on Tableau (Public) as a Tool to Organise Data
Pivot Table on Excel is a powerful function that many users like. It has helped many like me to drill down and look at the data in multiple ways. However, the Pivot function on Tableau works a bit differently. I often use it to get the data organised in a way suited to drag and drop into Tableau to visualise. For example, in the original dataset, the category may be used as headers for 3 columns - "chair", "table", and "bed". But what I want is to have the categories in a single column so that they can be used as a pill in rows/columns, filters, colour legend, and so on in Tableau. So I pivot the 3 columns by right-clicking them on the Data Source page and clicking "Pivot". You can learn to do it here: https://www.rigordatasolutions.com/amp/pivoting-data-in-tableau. The pivoted dataset on Tableau can also be pulled into a spreadsheet for other uses on Excel or Google Sheets.
All in all, I hope that sharing these tips will help use Tableau more efficiently.