How to Group Objects in Tableau Dashboard

Creating a Tableau dashboard that’s functional is one thing, but building one that’s clean, organized, and easy for your audience to read is another challenge entirely. When you have multiple charts, filters, and text boxes floating around, your dashboard can quickly become a cluttered mess. The secret to a professional and intuitive layout is grouping related objects together, and Tableau’s Layout Containers are the perfect tool for the job. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to use them to structure and arrange your dashboards logically.

Why Should You Group Objects in a Tableau Dashboard?

Before getting into the how, it’s helpful to understand the why. Taking the extra minute to group objects isn’t just about making your dashboard look tidy, it provides significant functional benefits that make your work more effective and easier to manage.

• Improved Organization and Clarity: Grouping related items — like a chart and its corresponding filters or a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — creates visual cues for the user. It signals that these elements belong together, making the dashboard’s story and flow much easier to follow.
• Precise Layout Control: Do you want three KPI scorecards to be perfectly aligned and evenly spaced across the top of your dashboard? Instead of meticulously dragging and resizing each one, you can place them in a container and use the "Distribute Evenly" feature. This saves time and ensures a pixel-perfect, professional layout.
• Easier Formatting and Maintenance: When objects are housed within a container, you can apply formatting like borders or background colors to the entire group at once. This ability to format a whole section with a single click simplifies design changes and keeps your dashboard's styling consistent. If you need to move a section, you just move the container, not each individual object.
• Responsive Design Foundation: While Tableau offers automatic layout adjustments for different screen sizes, using containers gives you more predictable control over how your dashboard components will resize and rearrange. A well-containerized dashboard adapts much more gracefully to various display dimensions.

Understanding Tableau's Layout Tools: Tiled vs. Floating

In Tableau dashboards, every object you add — whether it’s a worksheet, an image, or a text box — is either tiled or floating. Understanding this distinction is fundamental to grasping how grouping works.

Tiled Objects

By default, when you drag an object onto a dashboard, it's tiled. Tiled objects create a grid-like structure where each item snaps neatly into place, filling available space without overlapping. Think of it like tiling a floor, each tile has its designated spot and fits perfectly next to its neighbors. This approach is great for creating structured, predictable layouts quickly.

Floating Objects

A floating object can be placed anywhere on the dashboard canvas, at any size, even on top of other objects. This gives you complete creative freedom over placement but can become chaotic to align and manage. Many users start by floating everything, only to find their dashboard becomes difficult to maintain when resolutions change or objects need to be moved.

The Key to Grouping: Layout Containers

So, where does grouping fit in? This is where Layout Containers come into play. A layout container is a special object whose sole purpose is to hold other dashboard objects. By placing your charts, text, and filters inside a container, you are effectively grouping them. This allows you a way to combine the pixel-perfect alignment control of a tiled layout with the placement flexibility of a floating layout.

There are two types of layout containers:

• Horizontal Container: Arranges the objects you place inside it from left to right, side-by-side.
• Vertical Container: Stacks the objects you place inside it from top to bottom.

Mastering these two simple containers is the skill you need to build nearly any dashboard layout you can imagine.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Group Objects Using Containers

Let's walk through the process of creating a simple grouped section of a dashboard. For this example, we’ll build a common header section with three KPI scorecards arranged horizontally.

Step 1: Start with a Container

First, open a blank dashboard in Tableau. In the left-hand pane under the Objects section, you’ll see options for Horizontal and Vertical containers. Instead of dragging a worksheet onto the canvas first, a best practice is to start by dragging a container onto the blank canvas. This forces you to think about structure from the very beginning.

Find the Horizontal container object and drag it onto your empty dashboard. It will automatically fill the entire space.

Step 2: Add Your Worksheets to the Container

Now, start dragging your worksheets (or other objects like Text boxes) into the horizontal container. As you drag a sheet over the container, you’ll see a gray shaded area appear. This visual indicator is critical — it tells you that you are placing the object inside the container.

Drag your first KPI worksheet into the container. It will fill the whole container. Now, drag your second KPI worksheet and hover it over the right side of the first sheet. You will see the gray shading appear on the right half. Release the mouse button, and the second sheet will now be placed to the right of the first one, perfectly splitting the container space. Repeat this for the third KPI.

Congratulations! You’ve just grouped three objects together in a container.

Step 3: Fine-Tune the Grouped Objects

With your objects inside the container, you now have powerful formatting and spacing options available.

Distribute Contents Evenly

If your objects aren't perfectly sized, this feature is for you. Click on the container itself to select it (a blue border will appear). Then, click the small dropdown arrow in the top right corner of the selected container and choose Distribute Contents Evenly. Instantly, all three of your KPI sheets will be resized to take up an equal amount of space within the horizontal container. This is far easier and more accurate than trying to resize them manually.

Edit Width or Height

If you don't want the objects to be evenly sized, you can manually resize them. Simply hover your cursor over the border between two objects inside the container until it turns into a resize arrow, then click and drag to adjust.

Alternatively, for precise sizing, select an individual item within the container, click its dropdown arrow, and choose "Edit Width" or "Edit Height."

Format the Container Itself

With the container selected, go to the Layout pane on the left. Here, you can add a Border or change the Background color for the entire group. This is a fantastic way to visually separate the section from the rest of your dashboard.

Advanced Technique: Nesting Containers for Complex Layouts

The real power of containers comes from nesting — placing a container inside another container. This allows you to build sophisticated, multi-layered dashboards.

Imagine you want a layout with a title at the top, our three horizontal KPIs below it, and a large line chart filling the space underneath the KPIs. Here’s how you'd build that by nesting containers:

1. Start with a Master Vertical Container: Drag a Vertical container to your blank dashboard. This will be the main container for the entire structure.
2. Add Your Title: Drag a Text object into the top of the Vertical container. Type your dashboard title in it.
3. Add a Nested Horizontal Container: Now, drag a new Horizontal container from the Objects pane and place it below the title text box inside the master Vertical container.
4. Add Your KPIs: Drag your three KPI worksheets into this new, nested Horizontal container, just like we did in the previous section. Use "Distribute Contents Evenly" to align them.
5. Add the Final Chart: Drag your large line chart worksheet and place it at the bottom of the master Vertical container, underneath the horizontal container that holds your KPIs.

You’ve now created a complex, perfectly aligned layout where a master vertical container holds three distinct elements: a title, a horizontal group of KPIs, and a main chart.

Tips and Best Practices for Grouping

• Use the Item Hierarchy: In the Layout pane, you'll find the Item Hierarchy view. This shows a tree-like structure of every object on your dashboard, including which containers they belong to. It’s an invaluable tool for understanding complex layouts and selecting deeply nested objects that are hard to click on directly.
• Build the Skeleton First: A powerful workflow is to lay out your entire dashboard structure with empty containers first. Add temporary borders to each one so you can see the "skeleton" of your dashboard before you add any worksheets.
• Control Spacing with Padding: In the Layout pane, you can adjust the Inner and Outer Padding for any object, including containers. Outer padding adds space around an object's border, while inner padding adds space inside the border, pushing the contents inward. Use padding to create clean white space between your grouped elements.
• Combine Floating and Tiled: You can place a floating container on a tiled dashboard. This is a common technique for things like filter panels, where you might want a floating group of filters to appear over your charts without disturbing the underlying grid.

Final Thoughts

Learning to group objects with layout containers fundamentally transforms your ability to build dashboards in Tableau. It elevates your work from a simple collection of charts to a thoughtfully structured, professional, and intuitive report. By mastering horizontal, vertical, and nested containers, you gain precise control over your layout, making your dashboards easier for you to build and for your audience to understand.

While mastering layout tools in platforms like Tableau is a powerful skill, the initial process of building reports from scratch still takes time. We built Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require so much manual configuration. Our tool allows you to connect your data sources — like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce — and then simply describe the dashboard you need in plain English. You can ask for "a sales leadership dashboard showing deal progression by stage and new business vs. upsell for this quarter," and our AI will instantly build the interactive dashboard for you, saving you from the hours of dragging, dropping, and formatting. It helps you get from data to decision in seconds, not hours.