How to Add Tabs in Tableau Dashboard

Building a Tableau dashboard with multiple, complex views can quickly get cluttered. Instead of cramming everything onto one screen or forcing users to jump between separate workbooks, you can organize your content into clean, intuitive tabs. This guide provides step-by-step instructions on a few reliable methods to create a tabbed navigation experience in your Tableau dashboards.

Why Use Tabs in a Tableau Dashboard?

Before getting into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Adding a tab-like navigation system isn't just for appearances, it serves several practical purposes that dramatically improve the user experience:

• Improved Organization: Tabs allow you to group related information logically. You can have a tab for a high-level summary, another for a deep dive into sales data, and a third for marketing performance, all within the same dashboard environment.
• Better User Experience (UX): A clean, tabbed interface feels familiar and intuitive to anyone who has used a web browser. It guides your users through the data story you're telling, preventing them from feeling overwhelmed by too many charts at once.
• Saves Dashboard Space: Instead of trying to shrink multiple charts to fit on a single screen, you can dedicate the full canvas to one set of visualizations at a time. This keeps each view clear, legible, and impactful.
• Guided Analytics: You can structure the tabs to walk a user from a broad overview to more granular details, creating a logical path for exploration and discovery.

Understanding The Core Concepts: Buttons vs. Sheet Swapping

Tableau doesn’t have a built-in, one-click “Tab Control” object like you might find in other software. Instead, we create the functionality of tabs using a combination of worksheets, dashboard objects, and actions. There are two primary techniques to achieve this effect, and the best one depends on your specific goal.

Method 1: Navigation Buttons (Linking Between Dashboards)

This is the most common and straightforward approach. Each "tab" is its own separate dashboard within the same Tableau workbook. You create "buttons" on worksheets that, when clicked, navigate the user from one dashboard to another. Think of it like a website's navigation bar.

• Best for: Completely distinct views that don't need to share a lot of the same filters or layout. For example, a "Sales" dashboard and a completely separate "HR Headcount" dashboard.

Method 2: Sheet Swapping (Showing/Hiding Sheets on a Single Dashboard)

This more advanced technique uses a parameter to dynamically show or hide different worksheets within a single dashboard. When a user selects "View A" from a dropdown or clicks a custom button, the worksheet for "View A" appears, and all others are hidden. It all happens on the same screen.

• Best for: Views that are closely related and should be analyzed in the same context, often sharing the same filters. For example, switching between viewing "Sales by Region" and "Sales by Product Category" in the same chart space.

We'll walk through both methods, starting with the navigation button approach.

Method 1: Creating Tabs with Navigation Buttons

In this method, we will create a consistent navigation bar that appears on three separate dashboards: Sales Overview, Marketing Performance, and Product Analysis.

Step 1: Build Your Dashboards

First and foremost, you need the content for each tab. Go ahead and create the individual dashboards you want users to navigate between. For this example, let's assume you've already built three dashboards in your workbook:

• Dashboard 1: Sales Overview
• Dashboard 2: Marketing Performance
• Dashboard 3: Product Analysis

Make sure they are named clearly, as these names will be important when setting up the navigation actions.

Step 2: Create the Worksheets for Your "Tabs"

The visual tabs themselves are actually small, cleverly formatted worksheets. We need to create a "selected" and an "unselected" state for each tab so the user knows which one is currently active.

1. Create the "Sales - Selected" Tab:

• Create a new worksheet and name it something clear, like Tab - Sales Selected.
• Create a Calculated Field called Label - Sales and give it the string value "Sales Overview".
• Drag Label - Sales onto the Text mark on the Marks card.
• Click into the worksheet and manually type in some spaces or a blank character on the Columns and Rows shelves so you can resize the shape better on the dashboard.
• Format it to look like an active tab. Click in the view and use the formatting pane to change the shading of the worksheet to a distinct color (like a medium gray) and make the text bold and white.

2. Create the "Sales - Unselected" Tab:

• Duplicate the Tab - Sales Selected sheet and rename it Tab - Sales Unselected.
• Edit the formatting so it looks inactive. For instance, change the worksheet shading to a very light gray and the font color to black.

3. Repeat for Other Tabs:

• Repeat this process for your "Marketing Performance" and "Product Analysis" tabs. At the end, you should have six total worksheets for your navigation: a selected and unselected version for each of your three dashboards.

Step 3: Assemble the Navigation Bar on Your First Dashboard

Now, let's build the visual navigation bar on the "Sales Overview" dashboard.

1. Go to your Sales Overview dashboard.
2. Drag a Horizontal container object to the top of your dashboard. This will hold our tabs.
3. From your sheets list, drag the tab worksheets into the container in the following order:
4. For each of the worksheets you just added to the container, right-click its title and select "Hide Title." Then, in the dropdown menu for each sheet, set the fit to "Entire View." This ensures they behave like buttons, not worksheets.

You now have a visual representation of your tabs, with the active one highlighted!

Step 4: Configure the Navigation Actions

This is where we make the magic happen. Dashboard Actions tell Tableau what to do when a user interacts with a sheet.

1. On your Sales Overview dashboard, go to the top menu and select Dashboard > Actions...
2. In the pop-up window, click Add Action > Go to Sheet...
3. Configure the action for navigating to the Marketing dashboard:
4. Repeat this process to create another "Go to Sheet" action. This time, have the source be the Tab - Product Unselected sheet and the target be the Product Analysis dashboard.

Now, on your Sales Overview dashboard, clicking the "Marketing Performance" or "Product Analysis" tab will take you to those respective dashboards.

Step 5: Replicate the Navigation on All Other Dashboards

The final step is to repeat steps 3 and 4 for your other dashboards. It's crucial for the user experience that the navigation is consistent.

• On the Marketing Performance dashboard, lay out the tabs as Tab - Sales Unselected, Tab - Marketing Selected, and Tab - Product Unselected.
• Then, set up dashboard actions that navigate from this dashboard to the Sales and Product dashboards when their unselected tabs are clicked.
• Do the same for the Product Analysis dashboard.

Method 2: Creating Tabs with Sheet Swapping

This method is perfect when you want to switch between different views on a single dashboard, keeping your filters and other controls constant.

Step 1: Create a Parameter

Parameters are dynamic values that users can change. We'll use one to let the user choose which worksheet to display.

1. In the Data pane, click the dropdown arrow at the top and select Create Parameter...
2. Name it "Select a View".
3. Set the Data type to String.
4. Under Allowable values, select List.
5. In the "List of values" area, add the names of the views you want to switch between. For our example:
6. Click OK.

Step 2: Create a Filtering Calculated Field

This calculation connects your parameter choice to a specific view.

1. Create a new Calculated Field and name it "View Filter".
2. The formula is simply the name of your parameter: [Select a View].
3. This field will now always return the current value chosen in the parameter.

Step 3: Apply the Filter to Your Core Worksheets

Next, we need to tell each of your main content worksheets to only appear when its name is selected in the parameter.

1. Go to your main "Sales Overview" content worksheet (not the tab button sheet).
2. Drag your calculated field, View Filter, onto the Filters shelf.
3. A filter pop-up will appear. Go to the Condition tab.
4. Select By formula and enter: [View Filter] = "Sales Overview".
5. This formula tells the sheet, "Only show yourself if the View Filter (and thus our parameter) is set to 'Sales Overview'". Click OK.
6. Repeat this for your other content sheets (Marketing Performance and Product Analysis), changing the formula to match the sheet's name each time.

Step 4: Stack the Sheets on a Single Dashboard

Now we bring it all together on one dashboard.

1. Create a new, empty dashboard.
2. Drag a Vertical container onto the canvas.
3. Drag all three of your main content sheets (Sales, Marketing, Product) into this single vertical container, one on top of the other.
4. Hide the title for each sheet. You'll notice only one is visible at a time.

Step 5: Show and Test a Parameter Control

Finally, give the user a way to control the parameter.

1. Go to your new dashboard. Right-click the "Select a View" parameter in the Data pane and select Show Parameter.
2. A control (likely a dropdown) will appear on your dashboard.
3. Now, test it out! When you select "Marketing Performance" from the dropdown, your marketing view will appear in the container, and the others will be hidden. You've successfully created dynamic tabs using sheet swapping.

Final Thoughts

Whether you're linking separate dashboards together with navigation buttons or using parameters to dynamically swap views on a single screen, creating tabs is a powerful way to organize your Tableau dashboards. Both methods elevate your work from a simple collection of charts to a polished, professional, and user-friendly analytical application.

While mastering these techniques in Tableau is a valuable visualization skill, we know the setup can be time-consuming. Sometimes you just need to group related insights without manually building navigation worksheets and configuring parameters. That’s exactly why we built Graphed. You can ask our AI data-analyst to "Show me my Facebook Ads ROAS vs Shopify revenue trend and also show me my top-selling products by category", and it will instantly generate an interactive, multi-view report for you - letting you focus on insights, not clicks.