Lingering lonely high above your Worksheet is the often overlooked Worksheet Tab in Tableau. As one of our consultants described it, the Worksheet Tab is certainly not the main event but there is no doubt, it has its uses. In this short blog, we show you three things that you can use the Worksheet Tab for and tell you why it can be useful.

How do I get rid of an unwanted Sort Icon in Tableau?

Sometimes you might not want to show your Sort Icon in Tableau. For whatever reason you may not want to give the viewer as much control over how they see what they want to see. So removing the Sort Icon can be useful when presenting a Worksheet as part of a bigger Dashboard.

To remove a Sort Icon you simply click on your Worksheet Tab on the top left above the Sheet and untick Show Sort Controls.

How do I add Caption to my Worksheet in Tableau?

Though they are not often used, as they cause clutter, Captions can be a handy way of giving people extra information such as author, owner, data source or date of last update.

Again go to the Worksheet Tab above your sheet and from the drop down select Show Caption.

You can then click on the Caption Pane and edit as you would a Worksheet Heading. As well as adding your own text you have the options of adding some pre-defined information such as Data Source, Update Time etc. It is worth mentioning that once you have populated your Caption pane you can then hide it again without losing the information.

Use Worksheet Summary to get a quick overview of ‘complex’ worksheets

Fourteen bars on a worksheet is obviously not that complex but let’s imagine it is for the sake of this example. If you want a quick summary of what your worksheet is showing you or you want to get a sense of your figures and how they tally with other sheets, the Summary can be useful. Again it is simply a case of selecting Show Summary from the Worksheet Tab and letting Tableau do what it does best.

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