How to Increase Font Size in Tableau
You’ve built a powerful Tableau dashboard packed with crucial insights, but if your audience has to squint to see the numbers, your hard work isn't making an impact. Readability is just as important as accuracy. This guide will walk you through exactly how to increase font size in all the essential places within Tableau, ensuring your data is clear, accessible, and ready for any screen.
Why Font Size is More Than Just a Design Choice
Before jumping into the “how,” it’s helpful to understand the “why.” Adjusting font sizes a few points up might seem like a minor tweak, but it has a major effect on how people interact with your dashboard. Here’s why it matters:
Accessibility: The most important reason. Colleagues or stakeholders with visual impairments will be able to engage with your work without struggle. Clear text is inclusive text.
Presentation Clarity: When you present a dashboard on a projector or a large conference room monitor, what looks fine on your laptop can become illegibly small from ten feet away. Proactively upsizing your fonts prevents this common issue.
Visual Hierarchy: Size communicates importance. A larger title tells the viewer where to start. Bigger labels on key metrics draw the eye to the most important takeaways. You can guide your audience's attention just by changing font sizes.
Mobile Readability: If your dashboard will be viewed on tablets or phones, default font sizes are often too small for comfortable reading. Adjusting them makes your work usable on any device.
The Two Main Ways to Change Font Sizes in Tableau
Tableau offers two primary levels of font control: worksheet-level and element-specific. Understanding both will give you complete command over your text's appearance.
Worksheet-Level Formatting: This is your broad-stroke tool. It allows you to set a default font size for the entire worksheet - titles, labels, and all. It's the best place to start for overall consistency.
Element-Specific Formatting: This is for precision. After setting a worksheet-level font, you can override it for specific parts of your view, like a worksheet title, an axis label, or the numbers on a bar chart.
Method 1: Changing Font Sizes for an Entire Worksheet
This is the fastest way to make everything in a single view larger and more readable. It creates a new baseline for all text within that specific sheet.
Follow these steps:
Navigate to the Worksheet: Open the specific worksheet where you want to increase the font size.
Open the Formatting Pane: Go to the menu bar at the top of the application and click Format > Font...
Adjust the Font Sizes: A "Format Font" pane will open on the left-hand side of your screen. Here you'll see options to control fonts for the entire sheet, pane, or headers.
Sheet: This is the master control. Changing the font here will apply to everything in the view - the title, axis labels, marks, etc. This is the best place to start. Click the dropdown menu under "All" and select a larger font size. You'll see the text on your visualization update in real-time.
Pane: Controls the text inside the main visualization, like the labels on bars or data points on a line chart.
Header: Controls the headers for your rows and columns.
Start Broad, then Refine: For the most efficient workflow, set your desired baseline size at the Sheet level first. Then, if needed, you can make smaller adjustments to the Pane or Header sections.
This method is excellent for getting 90% of the way there with just a few clicks. It’s perfect for ensuring a consistent look and feel across your workbook before you start fine-tuning.
Method 2: Fine-Tuning Specific Text Elements
Sometimes you need more granular control. You might want a massive title, slightly larger axis labels, and medium-sized marks. Tableau makes this easy by allowing you to format almost every piece of text individually.
Let's break down how to change the most common elements one by one.
Adjusting Worksheet or Dashboard Titles
Titles should be the largest text element on your sheet or dashboard to immediately orient the viewer.
Double-Click the Title: On your worksheet or dashboard, simply double-click the title text.
Use the Rich-Text Editor: An "Edit Title" dialog box will pop up. This is a simple rich-text editor where you can choose a different font, make it bold or italic, change its color, and - most importantly - select a larger font size from the dropdown menu.
Click OK: Once you're happy with the size, click "OK" to apply the changes.
Changing the Font Size of Axis Labels and Headers
Clear axes are essential for understanding the scale of your data.
Right-Click the Axis: Move your cursor over the X-axis or Y-axis text that you want to change. Right-click on it and select Format... from the context menu.
Adjust in the Formatting Pane: The "Format" pane will open on the left. Make sure the "Axis" tab is selected at the top. Under the "Scale" section, you'll see a dropdown menu for "Font." Here you can select a new size specifically for that axis.
Repeat for Headers: This same process works for headers in a table. Just right-click on a header and choose "Format..." to access its specific font controls.
Increasing the Size of Marks and Data Labels
These are the numbers directly on your bars, lines, or data points. Making them readable is a top priority.
Click on the "Label" Shelf: In the Marks card, click on the box labeled "Label."
Access the Text Options: More options will appear. Find the "Text" section and click the button with three dots (...) next to it.
Use the Text Editor: Just like the title editor, a dialog box will appear. Here, you can format the text that appears on your marks. Highlight the text you want to change and use the formatting tools at the top to select a larger font size.
Formatting Tooltips for Better Readability
Tooltips are the informational pop-ups that appear when you hover over a data point. They can get crowded, so increasing the font size is often a great idea.
Click on the "Tooltip" Shelf: In the Marks card, directly below "Label," click on the "Tooltip" box.
Edit in the Tooltip Editor: The "Edit Tooltip" window is another rich-text editor. You can select any text inside this box - field names, values, or custom sentences - and change its font size using the toolbar. This is a great way to create a clear visual hierarchy even within the tooltip itself.
Resizing Text in Dashboard Objects, Filters, and Parameters
When you assemble your worksheets into a final dashboard, you may add separate text objects or display filters that need formatting too.
For Text Objects: Double-click the text box on the dashboard to open the editor and change the font size, just like you would with a title.
For Filters/Parameters: Right-click the filter or parameter on the dashboard. Go to Format Filters... or Format Parameters... In the formatting pane on the left, you can adjust the font size for the Body text (the filter options) and the Title of the filter card.
A Few Final Tips for Perfect Fonts
Knowing how to change the font size is half the battle, knowing when and why completes the skill.
Think About the Medium: Always ask yourself: "Where will this be viewed?" A dashboard designed for a 60-inch television needs much larger fonts than one intended for a webpage embed on a laptop.
Establish a Consistency Policy: To keep your workbook professional, try to use a consistent set of sizes. For example: Dashboard titles at 24pt, worksheet titles at 18pt, axis labels at 12pt, and mark labels at 10pt. This consistency makes your work easier to digest.
Don't Be Afraid of Space: Sometimes, after increasing font sizes, things start to look cramped. Don't be shy about resizing the elements on your dashboard to give your now-larger text some breathing room.
Final Thoughts
Mastering font control in Tableau is an essential skill that transforms a good dashboard into a great one. Learning to adjust text across entire worksheets, specific axes, tooltips, and dashboard objects makes your data more accessible, professional, and impactful for any audience on any screen.
While perfecting these small but crucial details in a tool like Tableau is incredibly valuable, we understand that fighting with formatting panes and menus can often feel like time spent on busywork instead of analysis. Because we lived this frustration for years - spending hours tweaking reports instead of finding insights - we built Graphed. It's designed to skip the steep learning curve by letting you build powerful dashboards and reports just by describing what you want to see in plain English, giving you back the time to focus on strategy instead of settings.