How to Hide Gridlines in Tableau

A cluttered chart can completely undermine the insights you're trying to share. Unnecessary gridlines are often the primary culprit, distracting your audience from the story your data is telling. This guide will walk you through exactly how to hide gridlines in Tableau, giving you full control over your visualization's appearance for a cleaner, more professional look.

Why Should You Hide Gridlines in the First Place?

While Tableau's default gridlines can be helpful during the initial analysis phase, they often become visual noise in a final report or dashboard. Removing them isn't just about aesthetics, it directly impacts how your audience interprets the data.

• Improved Clarity and Focus: Removing extra lines helps the most important elements - like your bars, lines, or data points - stand out. Your audience's eyes are drawn directly to the data, not the background structure.
• Professional Aesthetics: A minimalist design often looks more polished and professional. Cleaning up gridlines and borders is a quick way to elevate your dashboard from a simple analysis tool to a high-quality presentation asset.
• Emphasis on Trends Over Precision: In many cases, you want to show a general trend, a comparison, or a pattern. Gridlines encourage viewers to pinpoint exact values, which might distract from the bigger picture. Removing them helps steer the narrative toward the high-level insights.

Think of it like this: if the exact value of every single point matters, you might be better off with a detailed table. For a visual representation of trends and patterns, less is almost always more.

How to Hide Gridlines with the Format Pane

Tableau centralizes most of its visual formatting options into one convenient place: the Format Pane. This is your command center for customizing lines, borders, fonts, and colors across your entire worksheet. Learning to navigate it is the most effective way to clean up your charts.

Here’s the step-by-step process for getting rid of those pesky gridlines.

Step 1: Open the Format Pane

The simplest way to open the formatting options is to right-click anywhere within the visualization (like on a white space or a data mark) and select "Format..." from the dropdown menu.

This will open the Format Pane on the left-hand side of your screen, replacing the usual Data/Analytics pane. At the top of this new pane, you'll see several icons for different formatting categories: Font (Aa), Alignment, Shading, Borders, and Lines.

Step 2: Navigate to Format Lines

Click on the last icon in the row that looks like a set of lines. This is the Format Lines menu, where you can control Grid Lines, Zero Lines, Trend Lines, Axis Rulers, and more.

Step 3: Turn Off Grid Lines

Inside the Format Lines menu, you'll see options to format lines for the entire sheet, or just for the Rows or Columns.

Start with the "Sheet" tab. Here, you'll find a dropdown menu for "Grid Lines." Click on it and select "None." This is the most common step and will instantly remove the primary background lines from your visualization. For many charts, this single change makes the biggest difference.

Step 4: Remove Zero Lines

Sometimes, even after removing grid lines, a line remains along the zero axis. This is Tableau's "Zero Line," which visually separates positive and negative values. While useful, it can be distracting if it’s not relevant to your analysis.

In the same "Sheet" tab, find the "Zero Lines" dropdown menu located just below "Grid Lines." Click it and select "None."

Step 5: Eliminate Axis Rulers and Ticks

Next, you might notice lines that bracket your axes - these are called Axis Rulers and Axis Ticks. Removing them will give your chart an even cleaner, "floating" look.

• Navigate to the "Rows" tab within the Format Lines pane.
• You will see dropdowns for "Axis Rulers" and "Axis Ticks." Change both of them to "None."
• Do the same thing for the "Columns" tab to remove the corresponding lines from the other axis.

What's the difference? Axis Ticks are the small tick marks along an axis that correspond to the axis labels. Axis Rulers are the solid lines that the axes are built on, running parallel to the axis labels.

Achieving a Fully Minimalist Design: Hiding Borders

After handling the lines, the next step towards a spotless design is to remove unnecessary borders that Tableau adds by default. These borders often divide panes, separate totals, or box in headers.

Step 1: Open Format Borders

In the Format pane, click on the "Borders" icon (the one that looks like a window pane, right next to the "Lines" icon).

Step 2: Remove All Default Borders

The Format Borders menu gives you precise control over every single dividing line in your visualization.

• Under the "Sheet" tab, you'll see sections for "Cell," "Pane," and "Header." These are the most common borders.
• For both "Pane" and "Header" under "Row Divider" and "Column Divider," click the dropdowns and select "None." Doing this for all options will remove almost all visible borders dividing your data.

For charts with grand totals or subtotals, you may need to go into the "Rows" or "Columns" tabs and adjust dividers there as well. The key is to systematically go through each dropdown and set it to "None."

Before and After: A Practical Example

Imagine you're creating a simple bar chart to show Sales by Sub-Category for a quarterly business review. This is what Tableau might give you by default:

Before: The chart is functional, but the screen is filled with faint horizontal lines (grid lines) running behind the bars. There’s a solid black line (zero line) at the bottom, and the Y-axis has a prominent ruler line. The entire chart is encased in a light grey border.

After following the steps outlined above - turning off grid lines, zero lines, axis rulers, and all cell borders - the chart is transformed.

After: The resulting view is simple yet powerful. Without any background clutter, the length of each bar becomes the sole focus. The message - comparing the performance of different sub-categories - is crystal clear. It's the same data but presented in a way that respects the audience's attention and looks professional enough to be placed in any executive presentation.

Best Practices: When to Hide and When to Keep Gridlines

While a clean design is usually the goal, gridlines aren't inherently bad. Knowing when to use them is a sign of a thoughtful data practitioner.

When to Keep Gridlines:

• For Detailed Analysis or Scatter Plots: If your viewer needs to compare specific data points with precision (e.g., in a scatter plot analyzing correlations), muted gridlines can provide a useful guide without overwhelming the view.
• On Dense Line Charts: When a line chart has many overlapping lines or significant fluctuations, gridlines can help trace values across the chart. The trick is to make them a light grey, so they serve as a subtle guide rather than a distraction.

When to Hide Gridlines:

• For High-Level Dashboards & Presentations: When your goal is to show the big picture - overall trends, major comparisons, or summary KPIs - gridlines are just unnecessary detail. Remove them to keep the focus high-level.
• In Bar, Pie, or Donut Charts: These chart types are designed for high-level comparison. Gridlines rarely add value and often just clutter up the space between bars or slices.
• When Using Direct Labels: If you're already labeling your data points with their exact values, the gridlines become entirely redundant. The labels provide the precision, so let the visuals provide the trend.

Final Thoughts

Mastering the Tableau Format pane is a simple yet incredibly effective way to elevate the quality of your data visualizations. By carefully removing unnecessary gridlines, borders, and other chart junk, you create clearer, more compelling reports that direct your audience’s attention exactly where it belongs: on the insights within your data.

Of course, manually clicking through formatting menus is just one part of the dashboarding process. We built Graphed because we believe valuable time shouldn't be spent wrestling with clicks and settings. With our tool, you can simply ask for what you want in plain English. Instead of navigating menus, you could just say, "create a bar chart showing sales by country and remove the gridlines." Graphed instantly builds the live, interactive chart for you, turning hours of formatting work into a few seconds of conversation.