Post originally publish on The Information Lab Blog
As Tableau users increasingly seek insight on the go, mobile dashboards are becoming an increasingly common request. For some time now, Tableau has included the ability to create layouts for different device types, notably, desktop (Default), tablet and phone. In the most recent release (2019.1) Tableau enhanced the capability by introducing automatic dashboard phone layouts.
This means that if you’ve built a dashboard and published just the desktop version, tableau will do its best to generate a mobile layout for you if a user views it on a phone. In the video below, we take one of the sample workbooks, switch it to a phone layout and you can see the Tableau automatically flows the content to suit the orientation and phone format with a long scroll based dashboard. This would be what the user sees if you didn’t add a phone layout yourself.
This feature comes enabled by default and is a great time save, but in some cases you might want to switch this feature off to build something more bespoke or you don’t want the web version of your workbook to have a phone layout that you’ve maybe not had the chance to check. To do this you have 2 approaches.
The first is to keep the automatic phone layout creation on but once you have your layout, customise and make it bespoke as I did int he video above when I switched to ‘Edit layout myself’.
The second is to disable it in the menu settings so the option isn’t on by default. This way if you only build a desktop view and publish it up, users will still only see the desktop design as the automatic creation isn’t enabled.
Note if you use Tableau public, Automatic creation of phone layouts is off by default so you’ll have to enable it unlike in Tableau desktop.
