How to Create a Collapsible Menu in Tableau

A cluttered dashboard is often an unused dashboard. When your filters, parameters, and legends are fighting for space with your charts, it’s easy for your audience to get lost. A simple collapsible menu can transform your entire Tableau dashboard, making it feel more like a professional, intuitive application. This guide will walk you through, step-by-step, how to create one using Tableau’s easiest method.

Why Create a Collapsible Menu? Less Clutter, Better Dashboards

Tableau dashboards are powerful, but that power can quickly lead to visual overload. If users have to squint to find the data they care about amidst a dozen filters and explanatory text boxes, they’re less likely to engage with it. Putting those controls into a hidden menu instantly cleans up your design.

Here’s why it’s worth the small setup effort:

• It saves prime screen real estate. This is the biggest win. By hiding filters and legends until they're needed, you free up the entire canvas for your most important visualizations. Your charts get the spotlight they deserve.
• It supercharges the user experience (UX). A clean, intuitive interface is more inviting. Users feel less intimidated and more in control when they can reveal options as needed, rather than being confronted with everything at once.
• It creates a clean, 'app-like' feel. Modern websites and applications frequently use hamburger menus or similar collapsible navigation. Bringing this familiar design pattern into your Tableau dashboard makes it feel polished, professional, and modern.

Instead of forcing your users to hunt for information, you create a guided experience where the data is the hero and the controls are helpful sidekicks, ready to appear when called upon.

The Easiest Method: Tableau’s Built-in Show/Hide Button

In the past, creating a collapsible menu in Tableau involved a somewhat convoluted process of setting up parameters, creating calculated fields, and configuring dashboard actions. While that method still works, Tableau has since introduced a game-changing feature that simplifies the entire process: the Show/Hide Button dashboard object.

This approach is significantly easier and more intuitive, especially for those who aren't data scientists or seasoned Tableau developers. The core concept is simple:

1. You place all your menu items (like filters or legends) into a single layout container.
2. You add a button object to your dashboard.
3. You link that button to the layout container.

That's it. Tableau handles all the complex logic in the background. When a user clicks the button, it toggles the visibility of the entire container and everything inside it. This means you can get a fully functional, professional-looking side menu up and running in just a few minutes, no calculations needed.

Step-by-Step: Building Your First Collapsible Menu

Ready to build? Let’s walk through the exact steps to add a collapsible menu to your dashboard. For this example, we’ll imagine we’re building a menu to hold a few dashboard filters.

Step 1: Get Your Menu Items Ready

First, you need the content that will go inside your menu. Navigate to your dashboard and identify the items you want to hide. These are most commonly filters, but they can be anything:

• Filters from any of your worksheets
• Legends for your charts
• Text boxes with instructions or definitions
• Image objects or web page objects

For now, just make sure they exist on the dashboard canvas. Don’t worry too much about their initial placement, we’ll be moving them into a container in the next step.

Step 2: Add a Floating Layout Container

The layout container is the magic box that will hold all of your menu items. The Show/Hide button feature works by showing or hiding an entire container, so this step is essential.

Critically, we need this container to be floating. A tiled container is fixed in place within the dashboard grid, which won't work for an overlay menu. A floating container can be placed anywhere on the dashboard, allowing it to appear on top of your other visuals.

Here’s how to add one:

1. On the Dashboard pane (usually on the left side), find the Objects section.
2. Make sure the "Floating" option underneath is selected, instead of "Tiled".
3. Drag a Vertical container onto your dashboard canvas. A vertical container will stack your filters and legends nicely on top of one another.

A transparent box will appear on your dashboard. You can resize it and move it to where you want your menu to eventually appear - typically along the left or right side of the dashboard.

Step 3: Place Your Menu Items Inside the Container

Now, it's time to populate your menu. Drag and drop the filters, legends, and any other items from Step 1 directly into the floating container you just created.

To do this correctly:

1. Click and hold the item you want to move (for example, a filter card).
2. Hold the Shift key on your keyboard. This is a crucial trick! Holding Shift while dragging an object tells Tableau you want to add it to a layout container instead of just moving it around as an independent floating object.
3. Drag it over your floating container until you see a grey shaded area appear inside the container.
4. Release the mouse button. The item will now be “nested” inside your container.

Repeat this process for all of your menu items. They should now be neatly stacked within the boundaries of your floating vertical container.

Step 4: Add and Configure the Show/Hide Button

This is where it all comes together. We'll add the button that will control our container's visibility.

1. Under the Objects section in the Dashboard pane, drag the Show/Hide Button object onto your dashboard canvas. Place this button somewhere intuitive, like the top corner of where the menu will appear. Make sure this button is outside the menu container itself.
2. With the new button selected, click the pop-out arrow in its top right corner. A context menu will appear.
3. Select Edit Button... A configuration window will pop up.
4. In the "Dashboard Item to Show/Hide" dropdown, select the floating layout container that holds your menu items. It will likely be named something generic like "Floating Vertical Container." (It can be helpful to rename this container in the Layout pane for clarity).

Once you’ve linked the button to the container, click "OK". By default, the menu container will disappear. Don't panic - this is correct! It starts in the hidden state.

Step 5: Customize Your Button (The Fun Part!)

A plain text button works, but for a truly professional feel, you’ll want to use icons - like the classic "hamburger" menu icon (☰) and an "X" icon to close it.

In the same Edit Button... dialog box from the previous step, you have Button Style options:

• Item Shown: This configures what the button looks like when the menu is visible. You probably want this to be a "close" cue. You can select "Image" and upload an "X" icon image, or select "Text" and type the letter "X" into the box.
• Item Hidden: This configures what the button looks like when the menu is hidden. This should be your "open" cue. Select "Image" and upload a hamburger menu icon, or select an appropriate text symbol.

You can also set the tooltip text and background color here to perfectly match your dashboard's design.

Step 6: Test and Position Your New Menu

Your collapsible menu is now fully functional! To test it, you need to exit the "layout editing" mode.

• In Dashboard Edit Mode: Hold down the Alt key (or Option key on Mac) and click your button. You should see the menu container and all its contents slide into view. Click it again, and it will disappear.
• In Presentation Mode: Simply click the button to toggle the menu open and closed.

Take some time to precisely position your floating menu container and its corresponding button. Ensure that when the menu is shown, it looks clean and doesn't awkwardly obscure any critical data points on your underlying charts.

Tips for a Polished, Professional Menu

Once you have the basic functionality down, a few extra touches can take your design from good to great.

• Use a Background Color: Select your floating layout container (it’s easiest to do this in the Layout tab of the Dashboard pane). In the settings, add a light background color and maybe a thin border. This helps the menu feel like a distinct panel that is sitting on top of the dashboard, rather than just a collection of random floating filters.
• Add Padding: To prevent your filters and legends from feeling cramped, add some inner padding to your main container. This gives everything inside a little room to breathe and dramatically improves readability.
• Add a Title: The first item in your vertical container could be a simple Text object. Give it a title like "Filters & Legends" and set the font to be bold and slightly larger. This immediately tells the user what they'll find inside the menu.
• Organize with Dividers: If your menu has a lot of items, drag Text objects into the container and type a series of dashes "---" to create simple horizontal dividers. This helps you visually group related filters or separate them from legends.

Final Thoughts

Adding a collapsible menu with Tableau's Show/Hide button is an incredibly efficient way to add a layer of polish and professionalism to your dashboards. It immediately enhances the user experience by prioritizing data, reducing clutter, and creating a modern, app-like feel without the need for complex workarounds.

At Graphed, our goal is to simplify the entire reporting process from start to finish. We understand that while formatting a dashboard in Tableau can be rewarding, the initial process of connecting sources and building visuals can still be a heavy lift. That’s why we made it possible to create entire, interactive marketing and sales dashboards by just connecting your data and describing what you want in plain English. Your dashboard is automatically generated in seconds, giving you more time to focus on the insights, not just the setup.