pbPassingBI
/
tableau/lessons/formatting-in-tableau
Formatting & dashboard interactivity beginner 6 min

Formatting

The formatting hierarchy, number formats, and removing what does not help.

What you'll be able to do
  • Use the Format pane at the right level
  • Set number and date formats once
  • Reduce visual clutter deliberately

The hierarchy

Formatting cascades, and knowing the levels saves a great deal of clicking:

  1. 1Workbook — Format → Workbook, sets fonts and colours everywhere
  2. 2Sheet — the Format pane's Sheet tab, for one worksheet
  3. 3Rows and Columns — separate tabs within the Format pane
  4. 4Field — right-click a pill → Format, for that field in that sheet
  5. 5Default properties — right-click in the Data pane, applies everywhere

The one people miss is Default Properties. Setting a currency format there means every sheet using that field is correct without formatting anything.

Number formats

Right-click a measure → Default Properties → Number Format. Currency, percentage, scientific, or a custom format string.

Custom formats follow the Excel convention, with sections for positive, negative and zero:

$#,##0.0,,"M";($#,##0.0,,"M")

Each comma before the closing quote divides by a thousand, so this displays 1,250,000 as $1.3M. On a dashboard of large numbers that is the difference between scannable and unreadable.

What to remove

Most formatting improvement is subtraction:

  • Turn off gridlines that are not helping comparison
  • Remove axis rulers and tick marks
  • Drop the axis title where the field name is obvious from the header
  • Remove borders between panes
  • Turn off the row and column dividers on tables
The test

Every visual element should be earning its place. If removing it loses nothing, it was noise.

Tooltips

Tooltips are formatting too, and usually neglected. Edit them to say something a reader can use — plain language rather than SUM(Sales): 1250.

Viz in Tooltip embeds a whole worksheet inside a tooltip: hovering a region shows its monthly trend. It is one of the highest-value features in Tableau and costs one line in the tooltip editor.

Consistency

Set fonts, colours and number formats at workbook level, then override deliberately rather than styling each sheet by hand. A dashboard where three charts use slightly different greys reads as unfinished even when nobody can say why.

Key points
  • Default Properties formats a field everywhere at once
  • Custom number formats with trailing commas divide by thousands
  • Viz in Tooltip embeds a whole worksheet in a hover
Check yourself