How to Create a Button in Tableau

Building interactive Tableau dashboards is how you transform a good report into a great analytical tool. While charts and graphs are the main event, small details like buttons can dramatically improve the user experience, guiding viewers through your data story. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to create different types of powerful buttons in Tableau, from simple navigation to dynamic show/hide containers.

Why Add Buttons to Your Tableau Dashboard?

You might wonder if adding buttons is worth the effort when users can just click through worksheet tabs at the top. The answer is a resounding yes. Thoughtfully placed buttons offer several huge advantages:

• Improved User Experience (UX): Buttons create an intuitive, app-like experience. Instead of forcing users to scan a long list of tabs, you can provide clear, labeled actions like "View Detailed Sales Data" or "Go to Marketing KPIs," making your dashboard far less intimidating for non-technical stakeholders.
• Guided Analytics: Buttons allow you to create a specific path for your audience. You can guide them from a high-level overview to more granular details in a logical sequence, ensuring they see the most important insights in the right order.
• Cleaner, More Polished Design: Using buttons lets you hide the default sheet tabs entirely, resulting in a cleaner and more professional-looking dashboard. It looks less like a raw report and more like a finished product.
• Saving Valuable Space: Functions like show/hide buttons allow you to tuck away elements like filters or detailed text descriptions, freeing up precious real estate for your most critical visualizations.

In short, buttons turn your dashboard from a static canvas into a dynamic and engaging tool that people will actually want to use.

Common Types of Buttons You Can Create

Before we build one, it’s helpful to understand the main types of buttons you can create in Tableau. Most buttons are essentially small worksheets configured with a Dashboard Action. Here are the most common uses:

• Navigation Buttons: These are the most frequent type. A navigation button lets a user click to jump from one dashboard to another, or from a dashboard to a specific worksheet.
• Show/Hide Buttons: These handy buttons allow you to toggle the visibility of containers on your dashboard. This is perfect for hiding/showing filter panes, extra visualizations, or instructional text.
• URL/Action Buttons: You can create buttons that open a webpage or trigger an email. This is useful for linking to a data dictionary, an external report, or a contact alias for support.
• Information Buttons: Often using just a simple "i" symbol, these buttons don't navigate anywhere but instead reveal a detailed tooltip when a user hovers over them, providing extra context without cluttering the view.

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating a Navigation Button

Let's start with the most essential button: one that navigates a user from an overview dashboard to a detailed view. We'll build a button on our "Executive Summary" dashboard that takes the user to our "Sales Performance" dashboard.

Step 1: Create a Dedicated Worksheet for Your Button

While you can use an existing mark on a chart as a button, it's often cleaner and more maintainable to create a new worksheet specifically for the button itself.

1. Create a new worksheet and name it something clear, like "Button - Go to Sales".
2. Create a calculated field. Let's call it Button Label. Inside, you'll just put the text you want on the button, wrapped in quotes. For example: "View Sales Performance ►".
3. Drag the new Button Label calculated field onto the Text card in the Marks pane.
4. Change the view in the top toolbar from "Standard" to Entire View. This ensures the button label resizes properly.
5. Change the Mark Type from "Automatic" to Shape. Now, click on the Shape card and choose a shape you like. A filled-in rectangle or a rounded rectangle often works best. You can also load custom shapes (like designed button images) into your Tableau Repository.
6. Format the button. Click the Text card, click the three dots (...), and format the label to be centered both horizontally and vertically. You can change the font, size, and color here to make it stand out. A white label on a dark shape, for instance, looks clean and modern.
7. Finally, right-click in an empty area of the sheet and select Format. Go to the "Borders" and "Lines" settings and turn off all grid lines, row dividers, and column dividers to make your button look clean.

You now have a simple worksheet that looks and functions solely as a button.

Step 2: Add the Button to Your Dashboard

Now, let's place the button on our starting dashboard.

1. Navigate to your main ("source") dashboard, in our case, the "Executive Summary".
2. From the list of sheets on the left, drag your "Button - Go to Sales" worksheet onto the dashboard. We recommend using a Floating object rather than Tiled, as it gives you much more control over exact placement and size.
3. Resize and position the button worksheet where you'd like it to appear. You can get rid of the title by right-clicking on it and selecting Hide Title.

Step 3: Configure the Dashboard Action

This is where the magic happens. A Dashboard Action tells Tableau what to do when a user interacts with the button worksheet.

1. With your dashboard open, go to the top menu and click Dashboard > Actions....
2. In the pop-up window, click the Add Action > button and select Go to Sheet.... This opens the configuration menu.
3. Name your action. Be specific! Something like "Navigate from Summary to Sales" is much better than the default "Go to Sheet 1."
4. Configure the Source Sheets. This tells Tableau which dashboard and sheet triggers the action.
5. Set the Action Trigger. Under "Run action on," choose Select. This is more standard user behavior than "Hover."
6. Configure the Target. This tells Tableau where to go. Choose your "Sales Performance" dashboard from the "Target Sheet" dropdown menu.
7. Clearing the Selection. Choose what happens after you click the button. "Leave the filter" is a good default for simple navigation.
8. Click OK to close the action configuration and OK again to close the Actions window.

Now, test your work! Your dashboard is still in edit mode. Hold down the ALT key (Option key on Mac) and click on your button. You should be taken directly to the Sales Performance dashboard. Voila!

Level Up: Creating a Show/Hide Button for Filters

Having a dozen filters visible can overwhelm a user and eat up valuable screen real estate. A show/hide button lets you pack them all into a container that toggles on and off with a single click. This feature leverages Tableau's layout containers and is surprisingly easy to set up.

1. Add a Floating Container. On your dashboard, drag a Floating container (either Vertical or Horizontal) from the Objects pane on the left. Position and size this container where you want your filter drawer to appear.
2. Place Your Filters Inside. Now, drag your filter sheets or filter quick-selects from your worksheets into this floating container. Make sure you see the dark blue border inside the container before you drop them, confirming they're nested correctly. Hold the Shift key while dragging to ensure they're added to the container.
3. Add the Show/Hide Button. Click to select the floating container (it should have a blue outline). A small grey dropdown arrow will appear at the top right of the container. Click this arrow and select Add Show/Hide Button.
4. Customize the Button Image. Tableau will instantly create a floating button object linked to that container. Double-click the new button object or click its dropdown menu and choose Edit Button....
5. Test it. Click OK and exit the dialog. Use the ALT+Click (Option+Click) method to test the toggle. The filter container should appear and disappear as you click the button.

Best Practices for Using Buttons in Tableau

Functionality is one thing, but good design ensures your buttons are genuinely helpful.

• Be Clear and Consistent: Use intuitive labels or icons for your buttons. A rightward-facing arrow (►) universally suggests "next" or "go to." Style all your buttons consistently across the workbook.
• Don't Go Overboard: Too many buttons can create the same clutter you were trying to avoid. Prioritize the most critical navigation paths.
• Leverage Tooltips: For every button, edit the tooltip on its worksheet. Add a simple description like "Click to view our Marketing Funnel." This small affordance removes any ambiguity for the user.
• Use Floating PNGs for Nicer Designs: For ultimate control over button design, create your buttons as transparent PNG images. You can then add these as floating image objects to your dashboard and attach Dashboard Actions directly to them, skipping the worksheet step entirely.

Final Thoughts

Creating buttons in Tableau is a simple yet powerful technique that shifts your work from a plain report to an interactive, user-friendly application. By mastering navigation actions and dynamic containers, you can guide your audience through the data, reduce clutter, and build a more powerful, professional tool for decision-making.

While this manual setup in a tool like Tableau gives you incredible control, it also shows how many steps are involved in just creating basic navigation. Many marketing, sales, and e-commerce teams just need immediate answers from their data without a lengthy setup process. It’s why we built Graphed. Instead of creating numerous worksheets and configuring multi-step dashboard actions, you can type "Create a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs Shopify revenue by campaign" and get a live, interactive dashboard built from all your connected sources in seconds. It allows your entire team to get the insights they need without first having to become a BI expert.