Tableau - Formatting

Tableau has a very wide variety of formatting options to change the appearance of the visualizations created. You can modify nearly every aspect such as font, color, size, layout, etc. You can format both the content and containers like tables, labels of axes, and workbook theme, etc.

The following diagram shows the Format Menu which lists the options. In this chapter, you will touch upon some of the frequently used formatting options.

Formatting the Axes

You can create a simple bar chart by dragging and dropping the dimension Sub-Category into the Columns Shelf and the measure Profit into the Rows shelf. Click the vertical axis and highlight it. Then right-click and choose format.

Change the Font

Click the font drop-down in the Format bar, which appears on the left. Choose the font type as Arial and size as 8pt. as shown in the following screenshot.

Change the Shade and Alignment

You can also change the orientation of the values in the axes as well as the shading color as shown in the following screenshot.

Format Borders

Consider a crosstab chart with Sub-Category in the Columns shelf and State in the Rows shelf. Now, you can change the borders of the crosstab table created by using the formatting options. Right-click on crosstab chart and choose Format.

The Format Borders appear in the left pane. Choose the options as shown in the following screenshot.