Innovative Tableau

Chapter 6. Show/Hide Button on Layout Containers

If making the backgrounds of sheets transparent were not enough, as of Tableau 2019.2, you can toggle floating dashboard layout containers on and off completely. This means that if you place a chart within a layout container, you can choose to show or hide that entire chart with the click of a button!

The ability to toggle layers on and off lends itself to some improved user experiences because you can show or hide elements such as instructions, filters and parameter controls, or additional layers of context. The ability to choose when to show or hide containers even provides a more innovative way to do sheet swapping, as described in Chapter 46.

This chapter shows you how to add a Show/Hide button to a layout container in Tableau.

How to Toggle Layout Containers On and Off

For this example, let’s revisit the Actionable dashboard within the Super Sample Superstore workbook from Chapter 4. Here’s our scenario: because this is the second dashboard in the workbook, and it is assumed that most of the controls will be adjusted on the first dashboard (Explanatory), we want to make that row of filters and parameter controls less of a focus.

Here’s how the original dashboard looks:

And here’s an updated version after removing the controls and moving the notifications up to provide better spacing for the visualizations: