Sometimes you want to customize titles or even hide titles in Tableau. When shown on a dashboard, titles will always appear, even when you filter out all the data in the view:

Notice how the title stays, even when all the data is filtered and the view isn’t drawn. This can be unsightly, especially in dashboards where I want to guide the user through some exploration. Who wants to see titles of things that aren’t meant to be seen until you take an action?

One way to hide titles in Tableau

1. Create a calculated field with hard-coded string:

I used the aggregation of MIN here to force it to be an aggregation to avoid it interfering with table calcs. (I also suspect that this is would be more performant than a row-level calculation in most cases, but I’m not sure. If you know, please leave a comment…)

2. Place the resulting calculated field on Columns to give you a custom “title” at the top of the view.

3. On the dashboard, you can hide the real title so that everything disappears when there is no data:

That’s not really a “title” it’s just a column header with some formatting. Here are the steps I took to get it to look like a title:

Right-click the column header and select Format

Change the font size

Switch to Borders on the format window and adjust the level of Column Headers.

And now, the title is hidden when the view has no data!

That’s it for this Tableau tip. There’ll be more soon. to keep up-to-date!