What is Dashboard Pane in Tableau?

Building a dashboard in Tableau can feel like stepping into a cockpit - tons of buttons, dials, and options. The central control panel for this process is the Dashboard pane, the menu on the left side of your screen where all the components of your dashboard live. Mastering this pane is the first step toward creating clear, interactive, and insightful visualizations. This guide will walk you through every feature of the Dashboard pane, helping you understand how to use these tools to build professional reports.

Understanding the Tableau Dashboard Workspace

When you create a new dashboard in Tableau, you're presented with a blank canvas. To the left of this canvas is the Dashboard pane. Think of this workspace as an artist's studio: the Dashboard pane holds your palette of pre-made paintings (your worksheets), your tools (objects like text boxes and images), and your framing options (sizing and layout controls). Your main canvas is where you assemble these pieces into a final masterpiece.

The Dashboard pane is divided into two primary tabs: Dashboard and Layout.

• The Dashboard tab is where you access all the components you can add to your canvas, like your worksheets, containers, buttons, and other objects.
• The Layout tab gives you precise control over the positioning, size, and appearance of items already on your canvas.

This article focuses on the Dashboard tab, as it's the starting point for building any visualization.

Breaking Down the Dashboard Pane

The Dashboard pane organizes all your available components into logical sections. Let's break down each one and see how it contributes to your dashboard-building process.

Size: Setting the Right Dimensions

The very first thing you should do when creating a dashboard is set its size. This determines the overall dimensions and affects how your dashboard will appear on different screens. Located at the top of the Dashboard pane, the Size section offers several options:

• Fixed size: This sets your dashboard to specific dimensions (e.g., 1000 x 800 pixels). This is great when you know your audience will be using monitors of a similar size, as it gives you complete control over the layout. You can choose from presets like Desktop Browser, or Blog, or customize the width and height.
• Automatic: This option automatically resizes the dashboard to fill the window it's being viewed in. While it sounds convenient, it can sometimes lead to unexpected layouts, as charts and text may be stretched or compressed in ways you didn't intend.
• Range: This is a hybrid approach, allowing you to set minimum and maximum dimensions. Tableau will adjust the layout to fit the viewer's screen, but only within the bounds you specify, giving you a balance of flexibility and control.

Beneath these options, you'll see a small button for Device Preview. This incredible feature lets you see exactly how your dashboard will look on a desktop, tablet, or phone. You can even create custom layouts for each device type to ensure a great user experience no matter where your dashboard is being viewed.

Sheets: Your Pre-Built Visualizations

This section lists all the worksheets you've created in your Tableau workbook. Each worksheet is a single chart or table - like a bar chart of monthly sales, a map of customer locations, or a line graph of website traffic.

To add a worksheet to your dashboard, you simply click and drag it from the Sheets list onto the canvas. By default, Tableau will add the first sheet to fill the entire canvas. As you drag in subsequent sheets, placeholder areas will appear, showing you where the new sheet will be placed (top, bottom, left, or right) relative to the existing ones.

A blue checkmark appears next to any sheet that has already been added to your current dashboard, so you can easily keep track of which visualizations you've used.

Pro Tip: Remember a fundamental rule of Tableau dashboards - they don't contain data themselves. They're a container for your worksheets. So, any filters, colors, or formatting should ideally be done in the worksheet first.

Objects: Adding Functionality and Context

Sheets form the core of your data story, but Objects are what turn a collection of charts into a polished, professional report. The Objects section provides a range of tools you can drag and drop onto your dashboard:

Layout Containers

• Horizontal & Vertical Containers: These are arguably the most important objects for creating clean, organized layouts. A horizontal container stacks items side-by-side, while a vertical container stacks them on top of each other. By nesting containers within containers, you can build complex, grid-like layouts that resize predictably. For example, if you want three KPIs at the top of your dashboard, you’d drop a Horizontal container onto the canvas first, then place your three KPI worksheets inside it.

Content & Media

• Text: Use this to add a title, descriptive paragraphs, annotations, or important callouts. You have full control over font, size, and color.
• Image: Perfect for adding a company logo, icons, or background images to brand your dashboard.
• Web Page: This allows you to embed a live web page directly into your dashboard. This is useful for displaying related external content, like a Google Sheets document, a company's internal wiki page, or even live financial data from a website, right alongside your Tableau vizzes.
• Blank: Don't underestimate the power of 'nothing'. Blank objects are essential for adding whitespace and spacing to your dashboard. You can use them to create margins between charts, pushing elements around for better alignment and a less cluttered look.

Interactive Elements

• Navigation: This object creates a button that users can click to navigate to another dashboard, a specific sheet, or an external URL. This is a game-changer for building multi-page dashboard experiences or linking out to data sources.
• Download: Give your users a convenient way to export your data. This button can be configured to export the dashboard as a PDF, an image, a PowerPoint presentation, or export the underlying data from a specific chart as a Crosstab (Excel).
• Extension: Extensions are like mini-apps created by third-party developers that add new features to your dashboard. You can find extensions for custom charts, write-back functionality, or integration with other applications in the Tableau Extension Gallery.

Tiled vs. Floating

At the bottom of the Dashboard pane, you'll see a toggle for Tiled vs. Floating. This choice fundamentally changes how items behave when you add them to the canvas.

• Tiled (Default): When you add an object as "Tiled," it snaps into a single-layer grid. Each object takes up its own tile, and they don’t overlap. When you resize one tiled object, the others on the dashboard automatically adjust their size to accommodate the change. This is the best approach for creating structured, predictable layouts. Think of it like tiling a floor - each tile has its own defined space.
• Floating: A "Floating" object can be placed anywhere on the dashboard, even on top of other objects. You have pixel-perfect control over its size and position. This is ideal for things like placing a title over a background image, creating pop-up help indicators, or overlapping charts for a specific visual effect.

Most great dashboards use a combination of both. You might use a tiled layout for the main structure (e.g., a few key charts in containers) and then add floating objects for the title, company logo, and interactive filters.

Final Thoughts

The Dashboard pane is the command center for building reports in Tableau. It provides access to your worksheets, interactive objects, and crucial layout controls that all work together to help you assemble a data story. By understanding how to use sizing, sheets, objects, and containers, you unlock the ability to move beyond simple charts and build truly compelling, professional-grade dashboards.

While mastering the intricacies of Tableau - learning about containers, device layouts, and the difference between tiled and floating objects - is a powerful skill, it requires a significant time investment. At Graphed, we've designed an approach that bypasses this steep learning curve. We connect directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce and allow you to build dashboards using simple, natural language. Instead of manually dragging and dropping elements, you can just ask: "Create a dashboard showing my sales funnel from new users to purchases by campaign for the last 90 days," and Graphed instantly builds a live, interactive dashboard for you, no experience required.