Use Tableau to Create Clear Chart Titles

Contributed by: Carl Allchin

Difficulty level: Beginner

While Tableau is a tool that helps you to communicate visually with data, you can aid the audience’s understanding of the data with careful use of any text accompanying the view. The title of the chart is likely to be one of the first things the user sees, so it can form a strong early impression.

While teaching Tableau to hundreds of people, I’ve learned that people typically use three styles of titles. Basic titles can help the reader understand what you are analyzing, but the rest of this Shortcut will show you how easy it is to improve on this. All titles produced in Tableau are manual, unless you want to use the default “Sheet 1,” “Sheet 2,” etc., so you’ll need to craft titles yourself for each view you create.

The Measures

The most basic form of creating a title is to state the measures being used in the view. While this helps to clarify what the view is formed from, it doesn’t help the audience comprehend what is being shown.

Figure 1. Basic title

In complex views using many data fields, this approach can actually lead to lengthy and confusing titles.

Question Posed

A better approach is to use the title to describe what question the view is addressing. By stating the question explicitly, you can show the audience the answer to the question you are trying to analyze. ...