From the course: Creating Interactive Tableau Dashboards

Sizing your dashboard - Tableau Tutorial

From the course: Creating Interactive Tableau Dashboards

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Sizing your dashboard

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- [Instructor] Let's look at some of the practical examples when it comes to sizing your dashboard. Now, looking at this example, I've got my four sheets on my dashboard, and, at the moment, it's a fixed size. Now, we size the dashboard by going to the Sizing panel in our pane on the left-hand side. Now, there's three options when it comes to size of the dashboard: fixed, automatic, and range. So let's look at the automatic first, and let's get that one out of the way. What the automatic one will do is it will scale the dashboard to fit any screen that's it currently being viewed in. Now, at first glance, this would seem ideal because the dashboard's going to resize to fill whatever size screen I've got. And we can see here that, when I've resized my screen, I've now got no gray space. Just white space in my dashboard elements have all scaled to fill that screen. However, if somebody then views this dashboard on a much smaller screen, I don't know what that dashboard's going to look like because all of the elements are going to be squished up to fit that space. I've got no control over the end product. Now, if I don't know where people are going to view their dashboards and how they're going to view them, how can I be certain that dashboard is still going to work, it's still going to look good, it's still going to have that same level of acceptability and usefulness that I want it to have? I can't do that using the automatic. So on the face of it, automatic sounds really good, but actually in practice it's generally not a good idea to use it. Now, the fixed dashboard size gets around this problem. Because what that does is it says, no matter what dashboard you look at and where you look at it, on whatever size screen, it's always going to look exactly the same. Now, when we go to the fixed size, we have some options. We have some prebuilt sizes in here that we can use. So we have 800 by 600 to fit on a laptop. We have different sizes for blog posts, for PowerPoints, and all these different options. But what that does, any one we select fixes that size. And we can see when I've selected the 800 by 600, my dashboard has shrunk in size. The gray area to the right and to the bottom is now kind of empty space. It isn't part of the dashboard. The dashboard is only the white background. Now, all of my sheets have been resized, but this heat map now has some problems because now it's too small to be useful. And if I change the sizing of that dashboard to view Entire View, it's just far too cluttered. So that dashboard size is going to be too small for that particular element. So it might be I need to remove that. Now, kind of the midway ground between the two is the range setting. So rather than fixed, we can say range. Now, what I can do with that is I can set a minimum and a maximum sizing that this dashboard will ever be sized to. It'll go somewhere between those two extremes. So if somebody's looking on a larger screen, they're going to see the dashboard, possibly with some empty space, but if they're on a smaller screen, it should size to fit them. Now, which one should you choose? Well, like most things, it depends. I'd never choose automatic. It's far too uncertain, and we don't know what the end product's going to look like. In most cases, the fixed one tends to be the right one, particularly if you're doing it for a work environment. What I'd advise doing is actually surveying your users. You know, where are they going to be viewing their dashboard? Is it primarily on laptop screen? Is it going to be on a monitor plugged into a laptop? So find out what screen size your users are going to be using, and then fix your dashboard accordingly. If you have people that have a range of different sizes and you need to make sure that it looks good on both a small size and maybe a larger size screen, then maybe the range is good for that. Set the minimum and maximum, and then that way you can ensure that you know where the boundaries are for your dashboard. In practice, if possible, I would always select the fixed. You know when you create the dashboard exactly what it looks like, so you know what the end product's going to look like. Sizing is really important to get right because it determines how much information you can put inside the dashboard, how many elements you can add to that dashboard as well. So I would recommend using the fixed size and picking the size that fits the majority of your users.

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