How to Copy a Tableau Dashboard

Copying a Tableau dashboard is a simple way to save hours of repetitive work and keep your reports looking consistent. Instead of starting from scratch every time, you can duplicate an existing design to use as a starting point or create variations for different analyses. This guide will walk you through a few common methods for copying your dashboards, from simple duplicates to reusable templates.

Why Bother Copying a Tableau Dashboard?

Recreating reports is a time sink. Copying dashboards streamlines your workflow and offers several practical benefits beyond just saving time.

• Maintain Consistency: When everyone on your team starts from the same base, you preserve a consistent design, color scheme, and company branding across all your reports. This makes your analytics look professional and easy for stakeholders to understand.
• Experiment Safely: Have an idea for a new chart or a different way to filter your data? Duplicate a dashboard to create a sandbox environment. You can test new ideas freely without the fear of breaking the original, production-ready version.
• Create Versions Quickly: Need to create slightly different versions of the same report for different audiences? For example, you might need a high-level summary for executives and a detailed, granular view for your marketing team. Copying allows you to quickly tailor a base dashboard for each team's specific needs.
• Build Reusable Templates: By creating a well-structured dashboard with your company logo, standardized containers, and a consistent layout, you can create a template. This means anyone can grab the template, plug in their data, and build a new, on-brand report in a fraction of the time.

Method 1: Duplicating a Dashboard Within the Same Workbook

This is the quickest and most straightforward way to copy a dashboard. You use this method when you want to create a slight variation of an existing dashboard without leaving your current Tableau workbook. It's perfect for A/B testing a visualization or creating a mobile-friendly layout from your desktop version.

Step-by-Step Guide to Duplicating

Follow these simple steps:

1. Open your Tableau Workbook: Launch Tableau and open the workbook containing the dashboard you want to copy.
2. Find the Dashboard Tab: Look at the bottom of the window where all your worksheet and dashboard tabs are located. Find the one you need.
3. Right-Click and Duplicate: Right-click on the dashboard’s tab. A context menu will appear. Simply select Duplicate.
4. Rename Your New Dashboard: Tableau automatically creates a copy with "(2)" appended to the original name (e.g., "Sales Dashboard (2)"). Right-click on this new tab and select Rename to give it a more descriptive name, like "Sales Dashboard - Mobile" or "Executive Summary."

An Important Note About Worksheets

When you duplicate a dashboard, you're only duplicating the dashboard's layout and arrangement of its components. By default, the new dashboard still points to the exact same underlying worksheets as the original.

This is a critical distinction. If you change a filter, modify a chart, or alter a calculation in a worksheet used on your new, duplicated dashboard, that change will also appear on the original dashboard.

To edit a viz on your copied dashboard independently, you must first duplicate the worksheet as well. Here’s how:

1. Find the worksheet used in your dashboard (look at the "Sheets" list on the left side of the dashboard view).
2. Right-click that worksheet and select Duplicate.
3. Rename the duplicated sheet for clarity.
4. Go back to your new dashboard, click on the original viz you want to replace, and swap it with your newly duplicated worksheet. You can do this by dragging the new worksheet from the panel on the left and dropping it on top of the old viz. Tableau will show a "Swap Sheets" icon.

Now, your duplicated dashboard uses a separate, independent worksheet, and any modifications you make will stay on this version only.

Method 2: Copying a Dashboard to a Different Tableau Workbook

This method is essential when you want to reuse a dashboard design in a completely different project or share a pre-built dashboard with a colleague. Instead of just duplicating the layout, this process copies the dashboard, its worksheets, associated calculated fields, and even its data source connection into the new workbook.

Step-by-Step Guide for Copying Between Workbooks

1. Open Both Workbooks: Have both your "source" workbook (the one you are copying from) and your "destination" workbook (the one you are copying to) open in Tableau simultaneously.
2. Find and Copy the Dashboard: In the source workbook, locate the tab for the dashboard you want to copy. Right-click it and select Copy from the menu.
3. Switch to the Destination Workbook: Bring your second Tableau workbook to the front.
4. Paste the Dashboard: You can paste the dashboard in a few ways. The easiest is to go to the top navigation menu and click Edit > Paste. You can also right-click any existing tab at the bottom of the screen and select Paste from the context menu.

That's it! Tableau will paste the dashboard along with all its required elements—including hidden worksheets, parameters, and calculated fields—into your new workbook. It even brings the data source along for the ride.

Handling Data Sources After Copying

Tableau is smart about managing data. When you paste your dashboard, a few things might happen with the data source:

• If the data source doesn't exist: Tableau will add the data source connection from the original workbook.
• If the data source already exists: If a data source with the exact same name and type is already present, Tableau will typically use it automatically.

Often, the goal of copying a dashboard is to use it with a new or different dataset. In that case, you’ll need to replace the original data source. To do this, go to the top menu and select Data > Replace Data Source. Here, you can map the old source to your new source, connecting your dashboard to a fresh set of data without having to rebuild a single chart.

Advanced Strategy: Creating Dashboard Templates

For teams that produce a lot of reports, building from scratch every time is inefficient. A better approach is to create a template workbook. A template is simply a pre-formatted Tableau workbook (.twb) designed for reuse.

Here’s how to set up a streamlined templating process:

1. Design Your Base Dashboard: Create a new Tableau workbook. Don’t connect it to any real data yet. Instead, design your ideal dashboard layout. Add your company's logo, set up a corporate color palette, define standard font sizes, and organize containers for where your title, filters, and vizzes will eventually go.
2. Establish Standards: If your company has specific KPIs or calculated fields that are used frequently (like "Cost per Acquisition" or "Year-Over-Year Growth"), you can pre-build these using dummy data.
3. Save It as a Template: Save this workbook with a clear name like "MyCompany Dashboard Template.twb" and store it in a shared location where your team can access it.
4. Use the Template for New Projects: When it's time to build a new report, a user simply opens this template file, connects it to their new data source using the Replace Data Source feature, and saves it as a new file name. Then, they can drag their worksheets into the pre-made containers. This process ensures brand consistency and cuts down setup time from hours to minutes.

Quick Troubleshooting for Common Issues

Sometimes, things don’t look quite right after copying a dashboard. Here are solutions to a few common problems:

• Formatting is Broken or Looks Weird: This often happens if the source and destination workbooks have different dashboard sizing settings (e.g., one uses "Fixed Size" and the other uses "Automatic"). Check the dashboard layout panel on the left and adjust the size settings to match.
• Filters Aren't Responding: A copied filter might not be applied to all the intended worksheets. Click the filter's dropdown arrow, go to Apply to Worksheets, and ensure it’s correctly applied to the sheets on your new dashboard.
• A Red Exclamation Mark Appears: You’ll see this on a field if there's a problem with the data source. Either a calculation is invalid, or the new workbook can't connect to the copied data source. Go to the Data Source tab at the bottom-left to check the connection details and enter the correct credentials if needed.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to copy, duplicate, and reuse your Tableau dashboards is a fundamental skill that separates efficient analysts from those stuck in a cycle of repetitive work. Whether you’re quickly duplicating a dashboard for testing or copying an entire layout to a new project, these techniques will help you build faster and maintain consistency across your reporting.

This process of manually copying, rebuilding, and reconnecting data highlights the traditional way of doing business intelligence. We built Graphed to remove this friction entirely. Instead of spending time in complex tools rebuilding the same dashboard over and over, you can connect your data sources once and use natural language to instantly generate new reports. Simply ask, "Show me last month's sales by region," and get a live, shareable dashboard in seconds, saving you from the all-too-familiar routine of exporting CSVs and wrestling with dashboard settings.