When in Doubt in Tableau Then Right-Click

One of my favorite shortcuts for getting hints on how to move forward in Tableau

Right-clicking in Tableau often provides clues for what to do next. In this video, Ryan will show you how right-click can be used to modify a title, edit an axis, and/or change formatting.

Hi, this is Ryan with Playfair Data TV. And in this video, I’m going to share a lifesaver for you. I’m such a big believer in this rule of thumb that I’ve made a video specifically for it. And that is, is if you’re ever in doubt when you’re building something in Tableau, right click. And it’s amazing how often you can get a hint about what to do next.

There’s lots of applications for this. I promise you will come across this. You won’t know how to do something in Tableau but simply right clicking on it before you do a Google search. Or try to look up another video on the site, just right click on it and you’ll usually be given a hint about what to do about it.

Let me just give you one example. Here’s a bar chart that we built in a previous video. One of the things that I don’t like about the chart is– and this is a personal preference, but this sheet title. It says, Sheet One. That’s the default name of that sheet title.

At a minimum, I would want to rename that sheet title. But I often also just like to get rid of them. It’s taking up about 5% of the real estate, the vertical real estate. I also find that those sheet titles or the context of the visualization is provided in the surrounding dashboard. Or if it’s in an email, usually that context is provided. I don’t always literally have to spell out the name of the sheet.

In both cases, whether I was wanting to rename it or get rid of it, I’d be looking at this as a beginner and saying, how do I rename that or get rid of it? Well, if in doubt, right click on it. Let’s see what the hints are.

We can edit the title, pretty good hint we wanted to rename it. Or the third option down is hide the title if we wanted to get rid of it. I’ll click hide title. Title goes away. Lots of applications of this.

Formatting, if you wanted to format something on the view, you could right click and click format. That opens the formatting pane where there are lots of different options on how to format the text, marks, borders. All kinds of things within the view.

Also on the axis, if you’re thinking to yourself, there’s too many tick marks on this axis. If in doubt, right click. The first option is edit axis. Click edit axis and one of the tabs here is called tick marks. If you chose tick marks, you could choose to fix them at a different increment. So, maybe instead of 100,000, you could do 250,000.

So, all kinds of applications for this. I just want to provide that little clue. If you ever get stuck, if in doubt, right click and you’ll usually be given a hint about what to do about it.

This has been Ryan with Playfair Data TV – thanks for watching!