Have you ever finished a Tableau dashboard project and been lucky enough to have a little extra time? Once the data is validated, the stakeholders’ needs are met, and the design is flowing, you might have just enough time left to put some extra “polish” on the dashboard.

I’ve built a viz on Tableau Public demonstrating 12 tiny tips that you can use to take your dashboard to the next level. Check out the viz here to see all the tips in action, and then keep reading below to learn how they’re all done!

(As always, not every tip applies to every project every time – some might be perfect for your dashboard, some might be overkill, and some might be so essential you already have them! You know best what will work for your use case.)

1. Make Your Tooltips Fancy

Tooltips are an easy place to polish up your dashboard! Often, default tooltips aren’t that great – they don’t emphasize the most important info, and can have weird field names that are hard to read.

Luckily, this is an easy upgrade! Click on the “tooltip” shelf on the worksheet.

Then you can edit the formatting and field names to make the tooltip much more useful to your users.

2. Add an Info Icon

Here’s another quick win! Create an information icon that your users can hover over to get more context about the dashboard – for example, where the data is sourced from, how often it’s updated, or what the dashboard is meant to be used for.

To add it, create a blank sheet and add a dummy field. (I created a calculated field called “Blank” that just has “” in it). Change the mark type to shape, and add the icon you want. (You can use one of Tableau’s built-ins, like the exclamation mark, or import a custom shape like I did using these directions.)

3. Make a Custom Legend

If you have varying mark shapes, multiple mark types, or just want to match your legends more closely to your charts, a custom legend is a must! Check out the detailed post about how to build one here.

4. Add a Filter Reset Button

Make using filters super easy for your users by adding a “reset filters” button that takes them right back to presets. Find the post with full directions for this here.

5. Display a data refresh timestamp

Did you know that Tableau titles (and captions) have built-in field options that aren’t available anywhere else? One of those fields is data update time. If you edit and reformat the the title of a sheet, you can use it to display refresh time on your dashboard.

(I like to put a “blank” dummy field as the data on my sheet so that it’s not tied to one of my visuals. Note that you do have to put at least one field on the sheet for the update time to work!)

If the data source is an extract, this will display the last time the extract was refreshed. If it’s a live connection, it’ll display the last time the data was refreshed in Tableau.

6. Put in a Background

A common practice for highly polished dashboards is to include a custom background, like the one I’ve included on this demo dashboard. This can let you create containers, add additional colors, and organize your design/layout elements.

These are often made in a design program, like Figma or Powerpoint. You can export the image you’ve created, add it to your dashboard as an image, and then add your other dashboard elements on top in a floating container.

There are also Tableau extensions that you can use to create backgrounds, like TabCSS, or methods to use Tableau objects like annotations to build backgrounds, like Irene Diomi’s.

7. Custom Format Your Dates

Dates have got to be the data type with the most options for formatting. Numbers? Words? Abbreviations or not? Month first or day first? Dashes or slashes? Customize your dashboard by right clicking your date and choosing a preset from the drop down, or using the “custom” category to create your own format.

In custom formats, you can choose how “long” the day, month, and year elements are by deciding how many “d”, “m”, and “y” to enter. For example, “m” is the short month number (9), “mm” is the long month number (09), “mmm” is the month abbreviation (Oct), and “mmmm” is the long month name (October). You can also add formatting characters here, like a dash, comma, or slash.

(Ok, maybe that date format won’t catch on).

Note: You’ll need to right click the date pill and choose “exact date” in order to unlock all these formatting options.

8. Personalize the Header

Here’s a nice simple one that I love adding to dashboard headers – greet the user by name! Adding a text item to the dashboard gets you access to a couple of functions (Full Name, User Name, Workbook Name, and Sheet Name) that you can use to create a personalized greeting.

If you want more options, you can also do this using a sheet title, like in #5, which includes a couple of extra functions.

Exactly what displays for “Full Name” depends on how your server is configured. On Tableau Public, it will show the user’s name if they’re logged in, or “Guest” if they aren’t. If you’re publishing to server or cloud, results will vary based on what the admins have chosen.

9. Add Icons

This is a tip you have to be careful with! Icons are easy to overuse, and too many icons (or icons that aren’t obvious enough) can make your dashboard harder to understand. However, when used carefully, icons can be a great way to add a visual at-a-glance level of understanding that’s faster to interpret than text.

For this bar chart (which of course would need an axis, etc, on a full size dashboard), I used a dual axis to add icons on top of the bars. I used a dummy field with a value of 1, added it to the columns as a dual axis, and adjusted the axis to line up the icons where I wanted them.

Some other ways I’ve used icons in my dashboards:

• In a fancy table
• In an icon chart
• As clickable filters

And more! I recently subscribed to the Noun Project, which gives you unlimited use (with a paid subscription, or limited use with free) of thousands of icons, and I’ve found it to be worth every penny. (Not sponsored or affiliated!)

10. Color Code Titles

An alternative to using color legends on a graph is to include the colors in your title by color-coding key words. For example, in this title I matched “Sales” and “Profits” to their corresponding colors:

(Again, on a non-mini dashboard I would definitely have some additional labels/axis titles here! This is for demonstration only.)

It can also make sense to use this in addition to a standard legend! Sometimes it’s just an extra piece of coding to help people easily interpret graphs instead of an alternative.

11. Vary Your Font Styles

Even in the most basic text palette, there are lots of ways to vary your text to help emphasize important points and avoid distracting readers. Well designed text is easier to engage with and understand!

Try using big, bold, darker greys for titles and headers. Subheadings can be smaller, but still larger than body text. Using a light grey, smaller text, and italics helps less important content recede into the background until viewers go looking for it. And don’t forget about using capitalization to your advantage!

12. Customize your colors

You don’t have to go crazy with wild colors to polish up your dashboard. Even small tweaks can make a big difference! In this example, I took the default Tableau color palette and stuck with the same general colors – however, I chose variations that matched my overall palette better.

When you’re editing colors, you can double click the color square (in the color edit menu) to get access to a full color picker and an infinite range of colors. I recommend using them! Small changes to color can help refine your viz, or align it to your brand colors or other design guidelines.

You can also create your own custom color palettes so that you can reuse the colors you chose over and over! Check out the steps in this blog post.

Time to refine!

And that’s it – 12 tiny upgrades that will make your dashboard look more polished, and make it easier for viewers to use. Which tips are you going to try? Are there any of these tricks you’d like to see a deeper dive into on the blog?