Tableau workbook titles and scroll bars
Titles of any report or dashboards, irrespective of application, they speak for themselves. Your workbook title may convey the purpose of visualization to end user. There can be detailed strategic path during requirement gathering phase itself to address titles of deliverables. There can also some deliverables which follow as per industry frameworks like Banking and Telecom, and these titles cannot be changed as per tools compatibility or as per user convenience due to certain regulations.
Why are we talking about titles of reports, which is a very simple topic of discussion while working on such great visualization tools like Tableau.
Did you ever thought that your report title may disturb the view of your dashboard, or in other words , the view can change by an additional scroll bars which you never expected while developing report on Tableau application and you only observed it after publishing and viewed it on a web browser.
Lets see below dashboard where we can see 2 scroll bars (1 from workbook, 1 from web browser).
While was developing, haven’t expected this additional scroll bar. The quick fixes will be to increase bar chart width or do a fix width to that specific container to remove scroll bar 1, which is possible. The second one from browser, in order to fix it the only option is to reduce browser size by some percentage (Page zoom). This is not a good advise to ask end users to fix browser size for every report that they open, also it won’t leave a good impression on how the way dashboards are viewed with multiple scroll bars.
Let’s talk about reason on this extra scroll bar, especially from browser. In above case, any workbook title more than 46 characters (on multiple browsers as per existing setup) will lead to extra scroll bar. To handle this extra scroll bars, length of workbook titles are also a reason to be looked into. We are not talking about limiting title to certain character length when regulatory frameworks are strictly followed for report development. It should be easy to understand for developer and end user , why only certain reports have this extra scroll bars.
It is good to have 360 degree view in every aspect while considering deliverables, where even report titles also can make a difference in final output.
Thank you,
P.S: A very simple topic, purpose of sharing is to avoid those extra hours to figure out root causes of these extra scroll bars.