14 Jun Why You Need a Layout Container in Tableau Dashboard

This tutorial will discuss why you need to use a layout container in your dashboard. Layout Containers are perfect for neatly arranging objects when creating your dashboard. Arranging objects in a dashboard has always been a struggle for some Developers, who find this confusing.

We must be intentional about arranging our worksheets in an orderly manner on our dashboard. Setting them well gives the dashboard a cleaner look for the audience or users. This is why containers are the solution to standardize the size and layout of the dashboard when viewed via different device lenses(Desktop, Tablet, Phone).

Before we move into using Layout Containers in Tableau, let’s discuss critical things to consider while planning our dashboard.

Define your Audience — You need to define your audience and what they want to see on their dashboard. Also, ask if your dashboard is user-friendly, whereby the audience can quickly grasp what you did and, what are the metrics important to your audiences’ businesses.

Layout — The layout, which is the subject of our discussion today, is also vital when planning a dashboard. You should always separate your dashboards into sections, making navigating easier for your users.

Design Purposeful Dashboard — When designing your dashboard, it has to be purposeful, whereby you consider the impact it has on the users or audience. It would help if you also consider how your audience would understand the dashboard.

How to Get Started with Layout Containers

Containers, like we said, allow us to group our objects, i.e., worksheets, images, filters, and lots more, together. We can move the container anywhere we want, and our dashboard objects will maintain the size we allocate.

We have two types of Layout containers; Horizontal and Vertical.

Horizontal Containers — The horizontal containers help group worksheets and dashboard components from left to right across our page. There is no limit to the number of containers we can place within other containers.

Vertical Containers — Vertical containers help users group worksheets from top to bottom down along a page. So we may have a horizontal container on the left-hand side and a vertical container to our right where the sheet has a drop-down filter.

From the image below, you can find the Horizontal and Vertical containers under the Objects sections. You drag it inside your Dashboard working area to use either of it.

Steps to follow while Inserting Containers

Always have an outer Container: Whenever you’re designing your dashboard, it’s always good to have an outer container that contains both the dashboard title and its content.

Insert Dashboard Title and more Containers: Now that you’ve inserted an outer container, you can bring in more containers per your desired choice of placing content. Then you go further by typing in your dashboard title, which should be at the top of the view.

Also, Inside our containers, we can put temporary blank contents in to help us arrange our contents well while placing the worksheets in them.

Populate Containers with Worksheets: So now we can remove those blanks and populate them with our worksheets accordingly, and we put in mind to arrange them for easy navigation for our users or according to our audience priority.

We have a simple representation in the image below.

Also, you must always check your items’ hierarchy when working on your layout. This is very important as it lets you quickly change how objects are layered and grouped on your dashboard. The view tells you that Items at the top of the list appear in the front, while items at the bottom appear at the back.

A simple representation of the items hierarchy is shown below;

Hope you found this post helpful. Let’s know your thoughts in the comments section below. Thanks for reading.