# Make your charts pop: Tableau Quick Tip

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2017-02-07
- **Format:** Video · 4 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation
- **Tools:** Tableau (dashboards, formatting)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/make-your-charts-pop-tableau-quick-tip
- **Watch:** https://youtu.be/ZlAOP06vjs4

I show how to make Tableau content pop off the page using contrast. I start by adding deliberate black borders to bars, then apply the same principle to a dashboard using layout containers, border formatting and slightly off-grey backgrounds to focus the user's attention.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau adds subtle borders on hover to create contrast, but you can deliberately set a black bar border and lower its opacity (around 62%) to make bars pop off the page
- Use balanced layout containers with blanks either side and padding top and bottom so nothing contests for space
- Apply a slightly off-grey border to the layout container surrounding the content you want to emphasise
- Change the dashboard background to a slightly off-grey while keeping the sheet white so the content stands apart from the page
- Give the title a different, lighter shade of grey to create contrast across the whole visualisation

## Chapters

- 0:00 What it means to make content pop
- 0:45 Adding deliberate borders to bars
- 1:18 Balancing dashboard layout containers
- 1:58 Container borders and background contrast
- 3:21 Formatting the title to finish

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/make-your-charts-pop-tableau-quick-tip

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena