Hi, I hope you’re here from my blog post about horizontal and vertical containers. If not, you can find that post here. In any case, I want to enrich my guide to Tableau containers by reviewing the Layout pane in the sidebar. It looks like this:
You can adjust the position and size of a selected item from the Layout pane, but I will focus on the (more interesting) bottom half of the pane in this blog post.
BORDER
One way to customize a container is adding a border. This can help in differentiating the various containers in your dashboard and support your understanding of containers.
BACKGROUND
Another way to customize a container is by changing the background color. If you want to create a layout of cards or panels, I recommend changing the background to a different color from the dashboard’s.
Note that you can also adjust the level of opacity. I encourage you to experiment with transparency and translucency in your dashboards!
The next two sections are about padding! Padding provides space between dashboard elements. There are two kinds of padding:
OUTER PADDING
Outer padding is the margin beyond the perimeter of the board. If you imagine a framed photo, the photo is the visualization and the frame is the outer padding.
INNER PADDING
Inner padding is the margin between the item contents and the perimeter of the border. If we continue with the framed photo analogy, the inner padding is the picture frame mat.
I usually establish 10-20 pixels of inner padding all around and leave outer padding alone at 0 pixels all around, but it depends on the look I want to establish.
(If you’re still confused about padding, Erica Hughes illustrates it well in her blog post, Outer and Inner Padding in Tableau Dashboards.)
HIERARCHY
It’s easy to get lost within Tableau containers. When that happens, I like to review the hierarchy. By opening up the various containers, I can see the content in each and click specific items of interest.
For example, if I select the horizontal container above, the corresponding container is selected in the canvas, like so:
Unfortunately, you cannot move items in the Item hierarchy section of your Layout pane, but you can locate them in the canvas and make any necessary changes there.
Like most things in life, it takes time and practice to master containers. After building several dashboards for weekly client projects, I feel more comfortable employing containers; although I have to admit, there are times when containers frustrate me because getting them to “snap” in the right place can be tricky!
Lastly, here are some additional resources for Tableau containers:
