As you may know, there is no built-in way of drawing lines between sheets or objects on dashboards. There are several workarounds, such as the following:

To be honest, I find that these methods are quite cumbersome, and none of those is a robust or durable way that works every time. In this post I'd like to present an alternative way, which I found works easily in all cases I've used it. Imagine we have the following simple dashboard:

Example dashboard

Note that the dashboard is built using vertical and horizontal layout containers, which is a requirement for this technique to work well (see image below). If you're not familiar with layout containers, here's a few links which can help you understand:

layout-containers

Now, the trick here is very simple. We'll use a text object, of which:

  • The contents will be left emtpy.
  • The width or height will be set to 1px.
  • The background Shading will be set to the right color.

So basically, here's the steps in an animation:

line-separator

And  the result when having added one vertical and one horizontal separator:

2016-11-23-21_56_22-financien

 

Quite simple isn't it? Now remember though - overusing separators wouldn't be a good way to go, even now you know this great technique. Most of the time, using white space (the Blank object) is a great alternative, also bringing the right balance and structure to the dashboard. Experiment away!

Author
Timothy Vermeiren

Timothy Vermeiren

Analytics Domain Lead at Biztory, and DataDev Ambassador. Tableau Iron Viz 2018 Global Champion, Tableau Ambassador 2020-2021, Tableau Certified Consultant & Architect. He runs in his spare time & plays various musical instruments.

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