Why is My Tableau Dashboard So Small?

There’s nothing more frustrating than spending hours crafting the perfect Tableau dashboard, only to publish it and have someone say, "Why is everything so small?" This experience is incredibly common and usually stems from a handful of settings that control how your dashboard is displayed across different devices. In this guide, we'll walk through the primary reasons your Tableau dashboard looks tiny and provide step-by-step instructions on how to resize it for optimal viewing everywhere.

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The Number One Culprit: Sizing Settings

The most common reason for a small dashboard is its sizing configuration. Tableau gives you detailed control over the dashboard's dimensions, which is powerful but also easy to get wrong if you don't understand the options. On the left-hand pane of the dashboard view, under the "Dashboard" tab, you'll find the key section called "Size". Here’s a breakdown of the three main settings and when you should use them:

1. Fixed Size

A "Fixed Size" dashboard retains exact pixel dimensions, regardless of the screen on which it's viewed. For example, if you design a dashboard at 1000 pixels wide by 800 pixels high, it will always try to render at that specific size. This gives you absolute control over the placement and proportions of every single element.

• Pros: Totally predictable layout. You can be confident your text boxes, charts, and filters will never shift around unexpectedly, which provides a consistent viewing experience on uniform screen sizes.
• Cons: It's a recipe for problems with sizing. Any mismatch between the original design device and the display device can make your dashboard either too small on high-definition displays or force scrollbars on smaller ones. It’s also not mobile-responsive by design.

When to use it: Fixed size is ideal when you can dictate and know ahead of time the screen resolution of all users, such as kiosk displays, a TV in an organization’s boardroom, or an internally-used custom-built BI dashboard where all users use company-provided hardware with uniform display settings.

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2. Automatic

As the name implies, the "Automatic" setting will try to adjust the sizes and dimensions of the dashboard dynamically so it expands or contracts to use the full screen space available. While this might seem like the solution to all issues that "Fixed Size" has, it actually has some problems by itself.

• Pros: Takes up all the space you have, without causing scrollbar issues. This setting ensures that regardless of the user's screen size, it's always completely used, avoiding whitespaces or creating large scrolls.
• Cons: Loss of design integrity. There's absolutely no consistency over your layouts, especially when aspect ratios differ between displays, which can cause elements to become too squashed or too wide.

When should you use it? To be honest, probably never. Possibly for showing something quickly to an executive when the primary objective is to use all available space, or in an embedded solution on a website or webpage with varying resolutions where adaptability is needed. The general consensus for Tableau professionals is to go with Fixed or Range-based sizes.

3. Range (Your Best Bet for Flexibility)

Range is another widely used setting as it finds a nice middle ground between "Fixed" and "Automatic". This setting lets you specify minimum and maximum dimensions that Tableau will use to render all elements within the boundaries, trying to fit its dimensions without exceeding the specified range.

• Pros: A balance for design control. You can set a minimum design to avoid readability problems and an upper boundary with a maximum to prevent issues with stretching elements, which could create ugly spaces between them.
• Cons: It requires some trial and error and a bit of planning to figure out the correct dimensions to set as a minimum and maximum range. You'll need to consider design scenarios from portable laptops and tablets to the most common desktop monitor sizes your target users might employ.

How to Adjust Your Dashboard’s Size

1. Navigate to your dashboard in either Tableau Desktop or their Online version via the "Edit" menu.
2. Locate the "Dashboard" tab on the left-hand pane.
3. Find the "Size" settings section.
4. Click the dropdown button to choose one of the 3 options: Fixed, Automatic, or Range.
5. To set a Fixed Size, select a predefined template like "Generic Desktop" (1366x768) to suit common desktop resolutions.
6. If you want to choose Range, you can select a minimum size, e.g., Tablet - landscape - 1240x720 px, to a maximum size like Desktop - Wide 1600x900 px to cover both tablet and desktop displays.
7. See how your dashboard changes after your choice.

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Tweak Individual Worksheet Fit Options within the Dashboard

Ever notice that even on a perfectly sized dashboard, one specific chart looks weirdly small with a lot of awkward white space around it? This is usually due to the specific "Fit" settings for the chart within its dashboard container. Every worksheet you add to your dashboard can have its own properties, so you must check if you have selected the right one to avoid odd sizing results.

To access these settings, click on a worksheet inside your dashboard view, then click the down arrow in the gray border that appears, and look for the Fit options. These are the different Fit options:

• Standard (The Default): With the standard fit option, the size of your sheet remains untouched regarding the width or height on your dashboard sheet size. This often results in large white spaces on the right or bottom and is a common cause for dashboards not displaying correctly.
• Fit Width: This option stretches your worksheet, chart, or component horizontally to fill the available space from a fit width option on your chart in the dashboard. This choice works well for tall and narrow bar charts or a list of filters users want to select. It also ensures that if the dashboard is set to Range or Automatic size, your component will remain fit and fully occupy the space to the sides.
• Fit Height: As it implies, this setting will fill the available space on the Y axis making the component Fit Height. It's perfect for thin horizontal bar charts that fit just fine on the left or right of a bar.
• Entire View: This fills the space both horizontally and vertically within the container. This option is a solution to most sizing problems you have in your dashboard. Use this setting with the Entire view as the default method every time you add a component or worksheet that will hold a visualization in a dashboard. Please notice, though, that it must be applied correctly in its container without causing stretching or distortion. A text-based table might look really off when trying to fit the entire view, so use it just for visualizations or charts.

Find and Purge the Useless "Blanks" and Other Empty Layout Containers

Layout containers are crucial in the Tableau ecosystem. They are invisible boxes of two kinds, Horizontal and Vertical, that help the designer organize and align their components within their dashboard. While they are helpful, a very common mistake is having too many blank objects or nested empty containers that force all useful visualization into tiny spaces without even noticing it.

How to Audit Your Layout Containers for an Audit:

1. On the Dashboard pane, left-hand click the Layout tab.
2. Check the hierarchy View Item Hierarchy that shows your dashboard's structure, with each of your components in a tree-like structure.
3. Click on individual 'Blank' objects to see how much space they're taking in your dashboard. You might be surprised how much space they occupy in your visualizations.
4. To delete, right-click on your object and select Remove container. Also, look at the Hierarchy tree for any empty containers that may include another container without a worksheet, and remove them both.

To avoid having future issues, try to give your containers a name. This will help you manage complex dashboards without getting lost in the hierarchy.

Test Across a Wide Variety of Display Settings

The environment your users use to consume your dashboards matters a lot. You must know ahead what kind of hardware, operating system, and screen resolutions they have to design your dashboard as optimally as possible.

When you use a Fixed-Size setting in your dashboard, you might encounter many issues regarding your audience's technology and hardware. A high-def 4K monitor that shows a 1064x768 pixel dashboard will render a tiny box. A dashboard designed to be large and clear might be displayed poorly on the smaller resolution of the user's device, leading to a terrible user experience.

So my best advice for this section is to go for Range size as your default option. It accommodates the most variety of displays and resolutions. You could also instruct users about using the Fill screen feature by key binding Ctrl+H or clicking the Full Screen button on the bottom-right corner. Your users can even get rid of the side-nav bars from Tableau Online or Tableau Server, which can take up a lot of screen space when not needed.

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Final Thoughts

Troubleshooting why a Tableau dashboard is too small almost always comes down to checking three core areas: the dashboard size setting, the fit option for each worksheet, and any misplaced layout objects. By starting with the "Range" sizing option, setting most of your charts to "Entire View," and cleaning up unnecessary "Blank" containers, you can solve the majority of sizing issues and ensure a functional, readable experience for your audience, no matter their screen size.

Staying on top of layouts and sizing rules is tedious, and it is a common reason why teams spend more time debugging dashboard issues than just acting on an insight. At Graphed , we believe there's a faster approach. By connecting your dashboard to our platform and interacting with it using natural language, our in-house AI instantly generates and builds out clear visualizations and dashboards that are correctly laid out, without worrying about 'containers' and 'pixel perfection.' It's like having an analytics expert on your team, handling all the reporting work so you can focus on what's important: the growth of your company.