How to Hide Legend in Tableau

A Tableau legend is essential for helping your audience interpret the colors, shapes, and sizes in your visualizations, but sometimes, the best legend is no legend at all. Hiding it can clean up your visual, save precious space on a crowded dashboard, and reduce redundancy if the information is already clear. This guide will show you several techniques for hiding a legend in Tableau, from the simple right-click method to creating a sleek, user-friendly show/hide button.

Why Hide a Legend in Tableau?

Hiding a legend may seem like a trivial formatting tweak, but it's a fundamental part of effective dashboard design. Good design is about removing distractions so the data can tell its story. Before we jump into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." You might hide a legend when:

• The labels are on the chart itself. If you have a bar chart with each bar directly labeled with its category (e.g., "North America," "Europe," "Asia"), a separate color legend repeating those same categories is redundant.
• You're using a single color or measure. If your entire visualization uses one color to represent a single metric like sales, you don't need a legend to explain it.
• You need to save space. Dashboard real estate is valuable. On a dense dashboard packed with visualizations, removing a legend might be necessary to let your charts breathe or to make room for another KPI.
• You want a cleaner, minimalist aesthetic. Sometimes, the goal is simply a clean look. Hiding less critical elements like a legend contributes to a more professional and less cluttered user experience.

Now, let's explore the different ways to achieve this in Tableau.

Method 1: Hiding a Legend on a Worksheet

The most direct way to hide a legend is within the worksheet itself. This is the quick-and-dirty method for when you're building a view and know a legend isn't needed.

Let's imagine you've built a simple stacked bar chart showing sales broken down by product category ('Furniture,' 'Office Supplies,' 'Technology') for different regions. After dragging the 'Category' dimension to the Color mark, Tableau automatically generates a color legend.

Here’s how to hide it:

Step-by-Step Instructions

There are two incredibly simple ways to hide the legend right from the worksheet view.

Option A: Right-Click the Legend

1. Navigate to your worksheet.
2. Locate the legend card on the right-hand side of your worksheet.
3. Right-click anywhere on the legend card.
4. In the context menu that appears, uncheck the Show Legend option. The legend card will disappear instantly.

To bring it back, you can navigate to the main menu and go to Analysis > Legends and select the legend you want to show, or right-click the corresponding pill on the Marks card (in this case, 'Category' on Color) and select "Show Legend."

Option B: Use the Drop-Down Arrow

1. On your worksheet, find the legend card.
2. Hover your mouse over the legend card’s title bar to see more options.
3. Click the small downward-facing arrow that appears on the right side of the title bar.
4. From the drop-down menu, select Hide Card.

Both options accomplish the same goal: removing the legend from your current worksheet view. This is perfect for simple situations where the legend adds no value.

Method 2: Removing a Legend from a Dashboard

A more common scenario is that you've built a perfectly good worksheet with a legend, but you don't want that specific legend to appear when you add the sheet to a dashboard. Tableau automatically adds legends to a dashboard when you drag a sheet onto it, but removing them is straightforward.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Create your dashboard by dragging your worksheet(s) onto the canvas. When you add a sheet that has a legend, Tableau automatically places that legend into the dashboard layout, often in a vertical container on the right side.
2. Locate the legend you want to remove directly on the dashboard canvas.
3. Hover over the legend component. A grey border will appear around it with options at the top.
4. Click the 'X' (Remove from Dashboard) icon. This will remove the legend from the dashboard view without affecting its visibility on the original worksheet.

Pro Tip: You can also manage your dashboard components from the 'Layout' pane on the left. Any item on your dashboard, including legends, will be listed in the item hierarchy. You can select the legend there and use its dropdown menu to remove it.

Method 3: Creating an Interactive Show/Hide Button for a Legend

What if you want to give your users control? Maybe the legend is useful context for some people, but others find it cluttered. In this case, the best solution is to create a button that interactively shows or hides the legend. This improves the user experience immensely and is surprisingly easy to implement using Tableau’s layout containers.

This method doesn't require any complex calculations or parameters. It leverages a built-in feature for containers on a dashboard.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Add a Container to Your Dashboard Start by dragging a container onto your dashboard. You can choose either a Horizontal or Vertical container from the Objects section in the Dashboard pane. Crucially, you must make this a floating container to enable the show/hide functionality. So, make sure the "Floating" toggle in the Objects section is selected before you drag it onto your canvas. Position this floating container where you’d like the legend to appear when it's visible.
2. Add Your Legend to the Container Now, drag the legend for your visualization directly into this brand new floating container. When you hover over the container, a blue border will appear, signaling that you can drop the legend inside it.
3. Add the Show/Hide Button This is where the magic happens. Select the container itself (not the legend inside it). You should see a grey border around the container. Click the small drop-down arrow at the top right of the container. In the menu that appears, select Add Show/Hide Button.
4. Position and Customize the Button Tableau will add a new button object connected to the container. By default, it often appears on top of the container. To move it, hold the Shift key while you click and drag the button. This allows you to position it anywhere on your dashboard independently of the container. You can customize its appearance. Right-click the button and select Edit Button.... A dialog box will open where you can:

• Item to Show/Hide: This should already be set to your container.
• Dashboard Action: Governs when the button works (on hover or on click). 'Click' is standard.
• Button Style: Choose either an Image button or a Text button.
• Button Appearance: Set different images or text for when the item is shown versus when it is hidden. For example, the text could toggle between "Show Legend" and "Hide Legend." For images, you could use an arrow pointing one way and then the other.
• Tooltip: Add helper text that appears when a user hovers over the button. For example, "Click to show the color legend."

Now, test it out in Presentation Mode. When you click the button, the entire container — along with everything inside it (your legend) — will neatly appear and disappear. This is a powerful, professional way to keep your dashboards clean while offering detail on demand.

Final Thoughts

Mastering legend visibility in Tableau is a key step towards building cleaner, more intuitive dashboards. Whether you use a quick right-click on a worksheet, remove it from a busy dashboard, or build an interactive show/hide button to empower your users, you are taking control of the user experience. These small design choices are what separate a good report from a great one.

While tools like Tableau offer immense power, building these user-friendly dashboards can involve a lot of small, specific steps and a learning curve for new features. We created Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require you to become an expert in dashboard development. Instead of figuring out floating containers or dashboard actions, you can just tell our AI analyst what you need in plain English. Describe the report you want to see - down to details like "don't include the legend" - and get a live, sharable dashboard in seconds, with all your data sources connected and up-to-date.