Layout Schmayout, Use a Tableau Template!

If you are a beginner user in Tableau, you may not know what the best layout is for your dashboard.

If you ever visit Tableau Public's Discover site here, there is a whole Business Dashboard section where you can see different layouts for dashboards. You may start to notice that there are a lot of common attributes in these dashboards.

You can even search Tableau Public for templates and you may notice that many, many authors created a template to use for future dashboards.

Ken Flerlage created a couple for Sankey diagrams.

Jeff Plattner created one with several layouts here.

I joined the fun and created one here. I based this off of a dashboard by the very talented Omokehinde Ayodeji which earned a viz of the day!!

Each of these sheets, buttons, images and text on this dashboard serve as a placeholder for your selections.

How to use this template

1. Download the workbook

2. Connect to your data source

3. Start creating your charts!

4. Go to this dashboard page and click on the sheet you want to swap

5. Then click the double arrow on the sheet you want to replace it with

Tableau will ask you if you want to unhide or delete the worksheets. Delete since it is a "dummy" sheet.

All that's left is to make the sheet you replaced look nice, such as hide headers, do any text alignment and remove any gridlines.

Continue to do this with other things on the dashboard such as the images, icons, shapes etc. My icons are from icons8.com, a great site for free icons (at a certain size). The "Create a Team Logo" image is from Canva.com

This will save you time, if only with using containers. As a developer I have spent hours trying to get a container in a container.

Padding is also taken care of in this dashboard on the container level.

If you don't have 5 KPI sheets, all you have to do is remove one. (Removing is easier than adding!)

If you wish to add any more dashboards to this, I would recommend the practice of duplicating this dashboard sheet, so you retain the width and look of the navigation pane.

Please note that some templates you are unable to download them from Tableau Public. Mine is available and I may add more to this.