Recently I hit the G key by accident on Tableau, to my surprise something happened, gridlines appeared on my screen. This got me thinking what are the Tableau Keyboard shortcuts that people do not know about, and more importantly which are the ones you should know. Here is a link to the Tableau Website with all commands: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/shortcut.htm
Now I thought to myself, the website showing the keyboard shortcuts does not look pretty at all, nor engaging. So I made a Dashboard with the information there instead. Below is a preview:
I couldn’t find many tutorials on how to make a keyboard “map”, so I reverse engineered a dashboard made by Alexander Mou But I thought I could make it more interactive, and better yet provide an extract so people could see what I did and how I made it.
How To
The first step was to use Alteryx to scrape the Tableau website to get the information, then I used a transpose to convert the format to a machine-friendly version. I separated the Keys using the plus symbol, for example, Ctrl+V into Ctrl and V. Then I made an excel file with keys in one column, and Y and X coordinates that would correspond to the coordinates of an image. I downloaded an image of a keyboard and made the maximum x coordinates 120, and the maximum y coordinate 120. This doesn’t mean the image is a perfect square because the space between the coordinates on the different axis is different. That might be a little confusing to understand, but if you download an image and try it out, I promise you will understand it a bit more. The next step is very “hardcoded”. You must manually set the x and y coordinates of the different keys on the image. There is no help for this step as depending on how you have sized your image the coordinates may be off if resized. But to save time you know that certain keys will be on 1 of 6 Row coordinates because usually with most keyboards there are 6 rows. You may want to use a reference line and parameters to easily see where coordinates lie to also save time. Once you have the coordinates and the keys, you can join them up in Tableau and begin Formatting.
Useful Shortcuts
Now to get back to the topic at hand, what are some of the most important shortcuts? I think Ctrl+E is quite handy, this describes the workbook in a popup. Another is F7, which makes the screen go into presentation mode, always handy, if you panic and can’t find the button to do so. Lastly, Ctrl+V is well known but often underutilised shortcut in Tableau, if you copy a table or text online, you can paste it in Tableau and it will add it as a data source. I wouldn’t recommend using the paste option for all data, as it may need to be prepped before it can be visualised.
Please explore the Viz I made, hopefully, it helps saving precious seconds which could be better spent elsewhere.
For those using Alteryx here is a link to the shortcuts there. I may update the keyboard Viz to reflect the shortcut there to, or make a new one entirely.
