There are lots of ways to improve the clarity and professionalism of a graph in Tableau, but I've found just four simple changes can significantly improve a graph in only a couple of minutes. These changes are about making a chart look less cluttered, and less like the default Tableau formatting.
These steps, taking the bar chart on the left to the bar chart on the right are as follows:
- Avoid the default Tableau blue. While the default is fine for clarity, it gives the impression to a viewer familiar with Tableau that you haven't considered appearance, and have just thrown some fields onto your axes.
- Remove gridlines (maybe). While gridlines can be useful for comparing individual values, they can also make a graph look more cluttered and distract from the general distribution. This is a 'maybe' as it depends if you value simplicity or comparability more - line charts in particular may be more suited to keeping horizontal gridlines.
- Remove unnecessary axis titles. If your X-axis has 'Jan', 'Feb' and 'Mar' tick marks, there's no need to include the title 'Month'. In the example above, there's no need to remind the viewer that 'New York City' and 'Los Angeles' fall into the 'City' category.
- Add a subtitle in a smaller font. A bold title with a smaller, non-bold subtitle below, can give a professional appearance. Often, the title will contain a key finding from the chart, while the subtitle will describe the chart. This is a common style used in media output, for example graphs by BBC News or the Economist. The formatting I use in my example is 15pt bold Tableau Regular for the title, and 12pt Tableau Regular for the subtitle, with the subtitle in a lighter grey.
These steps won't transform your charts massively, but they are easy, quick, and can be applied effectively to most chart types.