Tableau supports creating a responsive view of any visualization you make in the dashboard by providing different layout options.
In the following screenshot, you’ll see a Tableau dashboard with three sheets added to the view.
By default, Tableau adds a Phone layout that’s going to be used when you are accessing the view from a mobile phone:
When you publish the dashboard to Tableau Server or Tableau Public, the layout will be used automatically when the screen size is reduced.
But keep in mind that Tableau detects the screen size only when the view is loaded.
If you change the layout after the view has been loaded, the layout won’t change:
As you can see from the above example, the dashboard layout didn’t change when the screen size change.
To change the layout, you need to refresh the web page after changing the screen size:
To add more layouts to your Tableau dashboard, you need to click on the Device Preview button to show the Device Preview bar.
When you select a Device type that has no available layout, the Add Layout button will appear on the rightmost of the bar:
In the screenshot above, you can see there’s an Add Tablet Layout button on the bar. Once you add the layout to the dashboard, the button will disappear from the bar.
In the new layout, you can select the Custom layout and re-arrange the sheets in the layout as you like.
In the example below, the vertical bar graph is placed on the right side:
The custom layout will only be used when you use a device with a tablet screen size.
Without adding more custom layout, Tableau will use the Default layout for all other screen sizes.
You can view and download the Workbook demonstrating the responsive layout here:
TableauResponsiveDashboardExample
When testing, don’t forget to refresh the page after you change the window size of the browser.
The Phone layout will be used when the window height or width size is 500px or less.
The Tablet layout will be used when the window height or width size is between 501 and 800px.
When the window is greater than 800px, then the Desktop layout will be used. Sometimes, Tableau might use the Tablet layout when your desktop computer window or display is too small.
And that’s how you can create multiple layouts to make a Tableau dashboard responsive. By default, Tableau has two layouts: Phone for mobile phone screens and Default for everything else.
By adding more layouts, you can customize the layout for the specified device type.
I hope this tutorial has been useful for you. 🙏
