How to Show Legends in Tableau

A great chart tells a story, but even the best story needs a guide to help the audience follow along. In Tableau, that guide is the legend. This article will show you exactly how to show legends in your worksheets and dashboards, add them back when they disappear, and customize them to make your visualizations clear and compelling.

What is a Legend in Tableau?

Think of a legend as the key to your map. It’s a small guide that explains what different colors, shapes, and sizes represent in your visualization. When you create a chart showing sales by region and use a different color for each region, the legend lists each region next to its corresponding color. Without it, your audience would be left guessing what the colors mean, making your beautiful chart confusing instead of insightful.

Tableau-generated legends aren't just for color. You can also have legends for:

• Size: If you use circles of different sizes to represent profit margins, the size legend will show what range of values each circle size corresponds to.
• Shape: If you assign different shapes (like squares, circles, and triangles) to different product categories, the shape legend will identify which shape belongs to which category.

In short, if you encode data using a visual property on the Marks card, a legend is necessary to decode it.

How Tableau Automatically Adds Legends

The good news is that Tableau is pretty smart about legends. Most of the time, it adds one for you automatically. Whenever you drag a field from your Data pane to the Color, Shape, or Size properties on the Marks card, Tableau instantly generates and displays a corresponding legend in your view.

Let’s walk through a quick example using the Sample - Superstore data source that comes with Tableau:

1. Create a simple bar chart. Drag Sub-Category to the Rows shelf and Sales to the Columns shelf.
2. Now, let's color-code these bars by Region. Find the Region field in the Data pane and drag it directly onto the Color box in the Marks card.

The moment you drop Region onto Color, two things happen: the bars in your chart are colored according to their region, and a Region color legend appears on the right side of your worksheet. It’s that simple.

How to Manually Show a Hidden Legend

What if the legend isn’t there? Maybe you closed it by accident or it never appeared in the first place. This is one of the most common issues for new Tableau users, but getting a legend back is easy once you know where to look. Here are a few ways to show a missing legend.

Method 1: Using the Analysis or Worksheet Menu

The top menu bar is your most reliable friend for finding hidden items.

• Go to the main menu at the top of the Tableau window.
• Click on Analysis > Legends. A dropdown will appear, listing all the potential legends for your current view. Click on the one you want to show (e.g., Region (Color Legend)).
• Alternatively, you can go to Worksheet > Show Cards > [Legend Name].

Method 2: Right-Clicking in the View

If you prefer using right-click context menus, this method is for you.

• Find an empty part of your analysis canvas (the white space around your chart).
• Right-click in that empty space.
• In the context menu that appears, navigate to Legends and select the legend you want to display.

Method 3: From the Marks Card

You can also show a legend directly from the pill that created it on the Marks card.

• Locate the field on your Marks card that's generating the legend (for instance, the Region pill on the Color mark).
• Right-click on that pill.
• From the menu, choose Show Legend.

Moving and Arranging Legends

Once your legend is visible, you need to place it where it makes the most sense. By default, legends are added in a "tiled" vertical container on the right side of the screen. You can grab the top of any legend with your mouse and drag it to rearrange its position inside that container or move it to a different area of the worksheet.

For more freedom, you can switch a legend to a Floating object. This lets you place it anywhere on your canvas, even on top of other elements like your chart.

To do this:

1. Hover over the legend to reveal a small downward arrow (More Options) at the top right.
2. Click the arrow.
3. From the dropdown menu, select Floating. Now you can drag the legend wherever you want without constraint.

Customizing Your Tableau Legend

A basic legend is good, but a well-formatted legend is even better. Tableau offers several options to customize legends so they are perfectly clear and stylistically consistent with your dashboard.

Editing the Legend Title

Sometimes the default title, which is just the name of the dimension ("Region"), isn't descriptive enough. You might want to change it to something like "Sales by Region."

• Click the dropdown arrow on your legend.
• Select Edit Title...
• In the pop-up box, type your new title and click OK. You can also format the font, size, and color here.

Editing Colors and Aliases

You’re not stuck with the default colors Tableau assigns. You can change them to suit your company's branding or to draw attention to specific items.

• Click the dropdown arrow on the legend and choose Edit Colors...
• An Edit Colors window will open. On the left, select a data item (like "Central"). On the right, choose a new color from the palette, and then click OK. You can change the entire color palette from the dropdown at the top right of this window.

Similarly, you can change the text labels in the legend by editing their aliases. If your data uses codes like "US-C" for the Central region, you can create an alias "Central US" to make it more readable for your audience.

Changing the Layout (Arrange Items)

How your legend items are arranged can impact the layout of your entire dashboard. Tableau gives you control over this.

• Click the dropdown arrow on the legend.
• Go to Arrange Items.
• You have four choices:

Using Legends for Highlighting

Legends aren't just for reading, they’re interactive. Clicking on a single item in the legend, like "South," will highlight all the marks associated with that item in your visualization while graying out everything else. This is a simple but powerful way for users to isolate and analyze specific segments of their data directly from the legend.

How to Show Legends on a Dashboard

An important detail to remember is that legends in worksheets do not automatically carry over when you build a dashboard. You add a sheet to your dashboard, and poof… the legend is gone. Don't worry, it's not actually gone, it's just waiting for you to add it.

Here’s how to bring a legend into your dashboard view:

1. Drag your worksheet from the Sheets pane on the left into your dashboard canvas.
2. Click on the worksheet you just added within the dashboard. Make sure it's selected (it will have a grey border around it).
3. Find the tiny More Options icon (a grey dropdown arrow) that appears at the top right of the selected worksheet container.
4. In the menu that appears, hover over Legends.
5. A list of all available legends for that worksheet will appear. Check the box next to the legend you want to add (e.g., Color Legend (Region)).

The legend will now appear on your dashboard as a tiled object. From here, you can move, resize, format, and set it to floating just like you would on a worksheet.

Final Thoughts

Legends are a fundamental part of creating clear and understandable visualizations in Tableau. By learning how to show, hide, customize, and arrange them, you take a major step toward building professional dashboards that empower your audience to find their own insights. With these techniques, you can ensure your legends always support your data's story, rather than complicating it.

While mastering the fine details in a tool like Tableau is incredibly powerful, sometimes you need insights faster, without searching through menus and formatting options. This is what we focus on with Graphed. We let you create dashboards using simple, natural language. Just ask, "Show me a chart of sales by region" and we instantly generate the visualization - legend included and perfectly formatted - so you can focus on answering your next question, not hunting for the right button to click.