Building beautiful charts on Tableau Desktop is easy. But with so many options to modify and adjust its appearance, sometimes it can be hard to know which formatting drop down to select and deselect on Tableau. Instead of always mass changing every option to ‘none’ to get rid of lines, here’s a quick guide on formatting chart lines. For this demonstration/ guide, I will use a mock dataset.
1. Enter the formatting pane
You can enter the formatting pane by clicking on Format on the Menu bar or right-clicking on the viz. The Format pane will populate the left side of the screen, usually defaulting to the Format Font settings.
2. Borders
The two main border lines that most people want to eliminate are the ‘Row Divider’ and ‘Column Divider’. I’ve changed them to red and blue and labeled them with a text box in the image below. Changing these to ‘none’ will rid the dividing lines.
3. Axis
Axis lines are generally quite useful. However, if you want to turn these off, then you want to go to the ‘Format Lines’ pane to turn off the Axis Rulers (and maybe Axis Ticks). I’ve bolded them and made them red to highlight them in the image below.
3. Gridlines
Finally, the line that most people want gone, the gridlines. Gridlines will be found by clicking in into the Columns or Rows tab (depending on the direction of the measures in your chart).
Final
Here’s the final bar chart with the borders, axis and gridlines taken out. I’ve also put in a bolded label with left alignment, a styling layout I prefer because people tend to read from left to right. Hop
