Switch between worksheets with CTRL + Tab

I’m always clicking ALT + TAB to quickly flip between different applcations in Windows so I was happy to learn that a similar shortcut makes an appearance in Tableau. Pressing CTRL + Tab switches you to the next sheet or dashboard along in your workbook. You can go backwards throught the sheets as well with Shift + CTRL + Tab.

*Bonus* If you click on a worksheet you can cycle through them with the Left and Right Arrow keys. This is really handy if you are presenting from Tableau and want to use the worksheets like slides in a PowerPoint.

Create a calculated field with Alt + A then C

There is a crazy amount of different ways that you can create a calculated field in Tableau (check out Ravi’s blog for the full list) but annoyingly there isn’t a proper keyboard shortcut. Luckily you can work around that by hitting Alt + A to open up the Analysis menu and then once its open clicking C will create a new, empty calculated field.

CTRL + W to flip your rows and columns

Despite using Tableau almost every day I’m still always putting fields onto rows when I should have put it on columns and vice versa. There is a button to swap rows and columns in the toolbar at the top of the window but CTRL + W is a neat way to quickly change up the view. It can also be useful when you have built a chart and want to quikcly check what it looks like if you pivot it.

F7 to enter Presentation Mode

Creating visualisations will almost always lead to showing them to someone. This is where the presentation mode feature built into Tableau comes in useful. It strips back everything but the contents of the sheet giving a nice clean view. Again there is a button for it in the toolbar but you can also launch presentation mode by hitting F7.