Antichaos

Tableau, Data Analyse & Visualisatie

Antichaos Blog

Tableau Container Art – 4 examples of formatting dashboards without images

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Tableau containers don’t exactly have the best reputation. Most people either ignore them or wrestle with them. But once you actually get along with containers (and their friends: borders, background colors, and padding), they turn into your dashboard’s interior designers.

No images were used during the making of these dashboard elements!

In this post, I’ll show you four small but powerful ways to use the Tableau containers to make your dashboards look sharper, cleaner, and maybe even a little more fun.

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The Tableau VizQL Data Service: What It Is, What It Can Do, and When to Use It

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When people think of Tableau, they usually picture dashboards, visualizations, and drag-and-drop analytics. In this traditional setup, users explore data by interacting with dashboards: charts, filters, tooltips, etc. But what if you don’t need the visuals at all—just the data behind them, with all the same calculations, filters, and logic already applied?

VDS: Data instead of Dashboard

That’s where the VizQL Data Service (VDS) comes in.
Rather than returning charts and visuals, it taps into Tableau’s VizQL engine to give you just the data behind any published view.. Instead of clicking through a dashboard, you can get the same data directly—like a spreadsheet or text file—by sending a simple request from another app or script.

In this post, we’ll explore what the VizQL Data Service is, what you can do with it, and how it fits into the broader Tableau ecosystem. A hands-on example is coming soon in a follow-up article!

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Abbreviate long text in Tableau

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When working with text data in Tableau, you’ll often need to clean or reshape strings to better fit your analysis or visual presentation.

Abbreviating text is a common challenge when designing dashboards, reports, or any interface where space is limited. Whether you’re working with long product names, category labels, or freeform text fields, overly long strings can clutter layout and make visualizations harder to read.

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