How to Add Show Hide Button in Tableau

A busy dashboard can overwhelm users, hiding key insights in a sea of charts and filters. Adding a simple show/hide button in Tableau is a fantastic way to declutter your design and give users control over what they see. This guide will walk you through, step-by-step, how to create a button that toggles the visibility of an entire section of your dashboard.

Why Bother with a Show/Hide Button?

Before we build one, let’s quickly cover why this feature is so useful. The primary benefit is creating a cleaner, more interactive user experience. Instead of presenting every possible chart, table, and filter at once, you can build a streamlined dashboard that reveals complexity only when the user asks for it.

This allows you to:

• Reduce Initial Clutter: Hide detailed tables or granular charts by default, keeping the main view focused on high-level KPIs.
• Save Screen Space: Tuck away a panel of filters, allowing your visualizations more room to breathe. Users can pop the filter pane open when they need it and hide it a moment later.
• Create Guided Analytics: Guide a user’s path by letting them drill down into more detail with the click of a button, making the dashboard feel like a custom application.

The Building Blocks: How It Works

The "magic" behind the show/hide feature relies on the interaction between a few core Tableau components:

1. A Parameter that acts as a switch, remembering whether the section should be visible ("Show") or hidden ("Hide").
2. A Calculated Field that works as a filter, checking the parameter's current value and deciding whether to display the worksheet.
3. A dedicated "Button" Worksheet that the user will click.
4. A Dashboard Action that links the button click to a change in the parameter's value.

Don't worry if this sounds complex. We'll go through each part one by one.

Step 1: Create the Control Parameter

The parameter is the state-keeper. It will hold the value that determines if your target worksheet or section is visible.

1. In the Data pane on the left, click the small dropdown arrow and select "Create Parameter".
2. In the dialog that opens, configure it as follows:
3. Click OK. You’ll now see your new parameter listed in the Parameters section at the bottom of the Data pane. You can right-click it and select Show Parameter to see it in action on your worksheet, which is helpful for testing.

Step 2: Create the Visibility Filter

Now, we need a calculated field that will use our parameter to filter the worksheet we want to hide. This calculation will simply check if the parameter’s value is "Show".

1. Click the dropdown arrow in the Data pane again and select "Create Calculated Field".
2. Name the field something like Visibility Filter.
3. Enter the following simple formula:
4. Click OK.

Applying the Filter

Next, find the worksheet you want to make collapsible (for example, a detailed data table named "Sales Details"). Drag your new Visibility Filter field from the Data pane onto the Filters card for that specific worksheet. When the filter dialog box appears, check the box for "True" and click OK. Now, this worksheet will only show data when the Visibility Filter is True, which only happens when our parameter is set to "Show".

You can test this right now. If you've shown the parameter on your worksheet, try changing its value from "Show" to "Hide". You should see your worksheet content vanish completely.

Step 3: Create the Button Worksheet

Manually changing a parameter from a dropdown isn't a great user experience. A clickable button is much better. To achieve this, we'll create a new, separate worksheet dedicated to being our button.

1. Create a new worksheet and name it something like "Button".
2. We need a label for our button that dynamically changes based on the current state. Create a new calculated field called Button Label with the following formula:
3. Drag the Button Label field onto the Text card in the Marks pane.
4. To make it look more like a button, you can change the Mark type from "Automatic" to "Shape" or "Square". You can then format the color, size, and alignment to your liking. Your goal is to make it look clickable.

Step 4: Combine Everything on a Dashboard

This is where the component that's toggled actually collapses and frees up space. The secret is to place the worksheet(s) you want to hide inside a layout container.

Using a Layout Container

1. Create a new dashboard.
2. From the Objects pane on the left, drag a Vertical Layout Container onto your dashboard canvas.
3. Now, drag the worksheet you want to hide (e.g., "Sales Details") and drop it inside this container.
4. It's very important to hide the title of this worksheet. Click the dropdown arrow on the sheet in the dashboard view and uncheck "Show Title". If you don't do this, the title will remain visible even when the content disappears, defeating the purpose.
5. Finally, drag your "Button" sheet onto the dashboard as well. You can place it anywhere you like.

Step 5: Create the Dashboard Action

The last step is to connect our button to the parameter. A Dashboard Action tells Tableau, "When a user clicks this button sheet, change the parameter to its opposite state."

1. Navigate to the top menu and click Dashboard > Actions...
2. In the Actions dialog, click the Add Action button and select "Change Parameter...".
3. Configure the action with these settings:
4. Select this new Toggler field for the value.
5. Click OK twice to close out of the dialogs.

That's it! Now, test your button on the dashboard. When you click it, the parameter action will fire, changing the parameter from "Show" to "Hide" (or vice versa). This change triggers the filter on your details sheet, causing it to appear or disappear within its container seamlessly.

Common Pitfalls and Pro Tips

• Worksheet Doesn't Disappear (Just Goes Blank): This is the most common issue. It happens when you don't place the sheet you're hiding inside a layout container. A container is what allows Tableau to collapse a sheet's space when it becomes empty. Forgetting to float it or put it in a container will just result in a big empty white box.
• Applying to Multiple Sheets: You can show/hide an entire section. Simply place all the worksheets and objects (like text boxes) you want to toggle into the same vertical layout container. Then, apply the exact same Visibility Filter to each of the worksheets inside that container.
• Building a Collapsible Filter Pane: This is a very popular use case. Instead of putting worksheets in the container, put all your filter and parameter controls inside it. Use the show/hide technique to collapse the entire filter pane, giving your dashboard a much cleaner, app-like feel.
• Button Stays Selected: After clicking, your button will sometimes stay highlighted, which isn't ideal. You can fix this by creating a "deselection" action. It's a slightly advanced trick involving creating a second 'filter' action that targets a dummy field on the button sheet itself, causing nothing to be returned and thus clearing the selection.

Final Thoughts

The show/hide button might seem like a lot of steps at first, but it is a powerful technique that dramatically improves dashboard usability once you master it. By combining parameters, calculated fields, containers, and actions, you can transform a static report into an interactive and dynamic tool that empowers your audience to explore data on their own terms.

Building great interactive dashboards is all about making data exploration easier and faster. At Graphed, we approach this by changing how you build charts in the first place. Instead of spending time manually configuring parameters and actions in a tool like Tableau, we let you create dashboards using simple, natural language. You can ask "show me sales by category and let me toggle the view between a bar chart and a table," and our AI handles building the interactivity for you, letting you jump straight from question to a fully functional, real-time dashboard without the tedious setup.