How to Add Logo in Tableau Dashboard

Adding a logo to your Tableau dashboard is a simple way to give your work a professional, branded look. This quick guide will walk you through the easiest method for adding a logo using an image object, as well as a more advanced technique for when you need more flexibility. We'll cover the step-by-step process, plus some useful tips to make your dashboards polished and ready to share.

Why Bother Adding a Logo to Your Dashboard?

Before jumping into the "how," it's worth briefly touching on the "why." A dashboard's primary job is to convey information clearly. So, where does branding fit in? Done right, adding a logo can:

• Establish Professionalism and Trust: A branded dashboard feels more official and authoritative. When sharing reports with clients or executives, this small detail reinforces that the data is presented by a credible source.
• Maintain Brand Consistency: For marketing agencies or businesses that use a specific brand style guide, adding a logo ensures all communications, including data reports, are consistent and recognizable.
• Clarify Ownership: In an organization where multiple teams create dashboards, a logo can quickly identify the report's origin and which department or project it belongs to.

In short, it's an easy win that makes your work look less like a raw analysis and more like a finished, polished report.

Step 1: Get Your Logo File Ready

A little preparation goes a long way. Before you even open Tableau, take a minute to make sure your image file is optimized. A bad image file can make your dashboard look sloppy or even slow down its performance.

File Format Best Practices

The best format for a logo is typically a PNG file with a transparent background. Transparency is the key here. A transparent background lets your logo sit cleanly on top of your dashboard's background color without a clunky white or black box around it.

While JPGs work, they don't support transparency, which can often look unprofessional unless your dashboard has a solid white background.

Image Size and Resolution

You don’t need a massive, high-resolution file. In fact, using an oversized image can slightly increase your file's size and workbook's loading time. A logo that's around 300 to 500 pixels wide is usually more than enough. You can always resize it smaller within Tableau, but starting with a reasonably-sized file is a good habit.

The Easiest Method: Using the Image Object

For 99% of cases, this is the quickest and most straightforward way to add a logo to your Tableau dashboard. It involves dragging and dropping a built-in object onto your canvas. Let’s walk through it.

1. Navigate to Your Dashboard View

First, make sure you're on the dashboard sheet you want to add the logo to. In the bottom tab-navigation, this is the icon with four little squares.

2. Add an Image Object to the Dashboard

On the left-hand pane, under the "Objects" section, you'll see a list of items you can add to your dashboard (like Text, Blank, Web Page, etc.). Find the Image object.

Click and drag the Image object onto your dashboard canvas. As you drag it, Tableau will show you gray shaded areas, indicating where the image will be placed. You can drop it into a specific layout container (tiled) or let it float freely on top of your other charts.

For logos, using a floating object is often easiest for precise placement. To do this, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard while dragging the Image object onto the canvas. Alternatively, you can select "Floating" under the "Add to Dashboard" object list first.

3. Choose Your Logo File

Once you drop the Image object onto the dashboard, a dialog box will pop up prompting you to select an image file.

Click the Choose... button, navigate to where you saved your logo file (e.g., your Downloads or Pictures folder), and select it. Click Open.

4. Customize and Position Your Logo

Your logo will now appear on the dashboard. It will likely need some resizing and repositioning. Here are the options you'll see in the "Edit Image" box and when right-clicking the image:

• Fit Image: This scales the image to fit entirely within the boundaries of the image object box. This is your best bet for logos as it prevents cropping.
• Center Image: This centers the image within the object box, which is useful if the container is larger than the image itself.
• Set URL: This is a cool feature that turns your logo into a clickable hyperlink. Enter your company’s website URL here to let users navigate to your site directly from the dashboard.

After clicking OK, you can resize the floating image object by clicking and dragging its corners and edges. The most common placement for a logo is in the top-left or top-right corner of the dashboard title area.

Alternative Method: Using a Custom Shape on a Worksheet

You may sometimes want a logo as an object that's part of a worksheet itself rather than a static image object. This method is a bit more involved but is useful if you want to apply filters or actions to the worksheet containing the logo. It gives you a little more dynamic control.

1. Save the Logo in Your Tableau Repository

Tableau pulls custom shapes from a special folder in your computer's files. You'll need to place your logo image here first.

• Navigate to this folder path on your computer: My Documents > My Tableau Repository > Shapes
• Create a new folder inside "Shapes" and give it a memorable name, like "Custom Logos".
• Copy your logo's PNG file into this new folder.

2. Create a New Worksheet for the Logo

In Tableau, create a new, blank worksheet. The purpose of this sheet is solely to display your logo.

• Create a simple calculated field to act as a placeholder. You can call it Placeholder and just put the number 0 inside it.
• Drag this new calculated field onto both the Columns Shelf and Rows Shelf.
• This will create a chart with a single point at the 0,0 coordinate.

3. Change the Mark Type to "Shape"

In the Marks card, click the dropdown menu that likely says "Automatic" and change it to Shape. Now, click on the "Shape" box itself. Find your folder "Custom Logos" and select your logo.

• If you don’t see your folder, click Reload Shapes.
• Select your logo from the palette and click OK.

Your logo should now appear on the worksheet. You can use the "Size" slider in the Marks card to make it bigger or smaller.

4. Clean Up and Add to Dashboard

Finally, you'll need to format the worksheet to remove all unnecessary lines, headers, and backgrounds to make it look clean.

• Right-click on the Placeholder pills on the Rows and Columns shelves and uncheck "Show Header."
• Right-click anywhere in the view and select Format.
• In the Format pane on the left, go to "Format Borders" (the icon that looks like a grid) and set all the Row Divider and Column Divider dropdowns to "None".
• Next, go to "Format Lines" (the icon with squiggly lines) and turn off all the Grid Lines and Zero Lines.
• Click Format Shading (the paint bucket icon) and set the Worksheet shading to None. This makes the background transparent.

Now, go back to your dashboard and drag this perfectly formatted sheet onto your canvas. You can use it as a tiled object or float it, just like the Image object. Voila! You have a logo embedded in a dynamic worksheet.

Best Practices for Using Logos in Dashboards

Whichever method you choose, a few general rules can help make your logo feel like an integrated part of your design, not an afterthought.

• Keep It Subtle: Your data visualizations should be the star of the show. The logo is a supporting element. Don't make it so large that it distracts from the charts and KPIs.
• Placement is Key: The top-left corner is the most conventional spot, as it's where the eye naturally starts. The top-right works well too. Avoid placing it in the middle or bottom corners where it can look out of place.
• Maintain Padding: A logo needs space to breathe. Don’t cram it up against the edges of its container or other elements. Floating objects in Tableau can be placed at precise x and y coordinates, and for tiled objects, you can use padding to create space around your object.
• Consider Dashboard Colors: Make sure your logo version has enough contrast with your dashboard's background. If you have a dark-themed dashboard, use a version of your logo with light-colored or white text and graphics.

Final Thoughts

Adding a logo is one of the quickest ways to elevate your brand within a Tableau report. You can insert a logo with the built-in images option, providing a hyperlink for interactivity. While slightly more intensive, using a logo as a custom mark is a helpful dynamic option to display a logo in your dashboard without interfering with your layout.

Manually building, tailoring, and branding reports in tools like Tableau is powerful, but it's an incredibly time-consuming, one-off task. It often takes hours to get a single dashboard perfect, only to repeat the process for every new set of data sources. We got so tired of that constant cycle that we built Graphed, a much simpler way to get the analytics dashboard you need simply by asking for it. When you connect all your business software to your account, it becomes simple to ask questions in plain English. You can see your ROI from your digital advertising and connect it directly to sales in your ecommerce platform using a simple search - your analytics dashboard builds itself.