I’ve been using tableau for many months now. However, every once in a while, I come across something really simple that I didn’t know existed which can help make using Tableau quicker and more user friendly. The ‘filmstrip’ and ‘screen sorter’ are one of these things.

Sometimes, you can create many sheets/workbooks in a tableau file, too many for tableau to show at once at the bottom of the screen:

Scrolling through all of these and figuring out which one has the chart you need can be quite time consuming when in this view when working with many sheets at the same time (for example: deciding what to put on a dashboard after brainstorming many different charts to explore the data).

However if you look at the bottom right of the tableau desktop, there are three buttons that I never looked at. If you click the middle one, you get the ‘filmstrip’ view:

This shows you the sheets with a small thumbnail of the sheet. This can be useful to remember what is on each sheet. However, it only shows as many as it can fit. If you choose the button on the left, you will get the screen sorter view:

This view enables you to view all your worksheets at the same time, with the small thumbnails to see what is on these. From this, order the tabs as you want, colour the tabs to organise which each relate to (which you can do in the other views, but this view allows us to colour them while seeing all at the same time).