Want to make your viz more compact and have little to no scrolling? Need to spice it up? This bar gives a sleek, professional look to the dashboard and is an easy way of navigating through your viz! Don’t make the user scroll endlessly just to read your insights. Allow them to quickly flip through to the relevant sections which is much more user friendly.

Steps

1. Create 2 sheets for every dashboard that you need to make a navigation button for – one for when the page is active and another for when the page is inactive. For example, in our scenario, I will make 6 buttons – Obesity A, Obesity I, Global Temp A, Global Temp I, Economy A, and Economy I.
2. Create the label for the buttons. Double click an area in the marks pane and type in the label from the sheet name. For example, Obesity A/I will have the label ‘Obesity’. The quotes will disappear once you press enter. Change the type to a label. From there you can edit the text colour/size. Mine is set to size 12. Change the alignment to centred. The process is shown below:

   Step 2

   Step 2: Creating the text for the navigation button

3. For the inactive sheets (sheets ending in I, instead of A) change the background colour to the colour you want. Mine will be grey. Click on Format at the top, select shading, then change the worksheet shading. The active sheets will remain white so that the user knows that is the page they are currently viewing.
   

   Step 3: Changing sheet colour to represent active/inactive page.

4. Now that all the sheets are ready, it’s time to add them to the dashboard!
   • Drag a tiled horizontal container to the top of the dashboard. Click on Layout and change the padding to 0. Move the container up until it’s the smallest height (32 pixels).
   • Drag a text object into the container. Put 5 spaces and enter Regional Charts. Change the size to 12 and the font colour to white. Press OK. Change the padding to 0.
   • Drag a floating horizontal container onto the dashboard.
   • Switch back to tiled and drag each button into the floating container, side by side. Use the inactive (I) sheets for buttons that aren’t the same name as the dashboard. Use the active (A) sheet with the name corresponding to the dashboard.
   • For each button, hide the title, change the fit to entire view and change the padding to 0
   • In the horizontal container, change it to distribute evenly
   • Uncheck the floating status of the horizontal container and then drag it next to the title. Change the padding of this container to 0
   • Adjust the sizing of the buttons to how you see fit.
   • Repeat this process for every dashboard.

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5. Now to use the new feature on Tableau 2018.3. It’s even easier to turn these to navigation buttons.
   • Click Dashboard at the top and then select Actions…
   • Click Add Actions > and then Go to Sheet…
   • In the Source Sheets, select the button you want to turn to the navigation button. These should be the inactive buttons. Select one of them and then in the Target Sheet, select the corresponding dashboard. For example, selecting only Economy I in the source sheets and Economy in the Target Sheet. Press OK.
   • Repeat the previous step for the 2^nd inactive button.
   • Repeat the previous steps now for each dashboard.
     

     Step 5: Setting the buttons as navigation buttons

Final Result!

Conclusion

That’s all there is to it! Give all the buttons a test to check if they are working. Now your viz has been taken to the next level.

Author: Alekh Srivastava