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Tableau | Data visualisation

Block comments in calculations

Tableau finally added block comments to calculations, and it's a quality of life win I've wanted for years.

Tim Ngwena •15 December 2020 •1 min read •2 min watch •1.6K

Watch on YouTube

The old way of commenting in Tableau calculations required adding a forward slash on every single line you wanted to comment out.
Block comments let you open with a forward slash and star, write across multiple lines, then close with a star and backslash.
This feature is available across desktop, Tableau Online and Tableau Server in the browser from version 2020.4.

0:00Hey, it's Tim here. Every so often, Tableau

0:02adds a quality of life improvements that

0:04literally just changes your life. Today

0:07they've added block comments and that is

0:09literally going

0:09to change your life. Let me show you why. I

0:12'm going to go ahead here and create a

0:13calculation.

0:14I'm just going to go ahead and do it here

0:16and notice I'm doing this in the browser.

0:19This is

0:19available on desktop but seeing as most of

0:21this release is all available in the

0:23browser,

0:23I'm taking a punt and doing everything in

0:26this series in the browser. So if you're

0:27using 2020.4

0:29you can of course do this in desktop but I

0:30'm going to do it in the browser for the

0:34sake of it

0:34essentially. I'm going to hit forward slash

0:36and I'm just going to show you how you used

0:37to comment

0:38before. You used to comment one line at a

0:41time. I can't spell for the record so time.

0:45Here we are,

0:46one line at a time. Gosh, I really can't

0:49spell. One line at a time. There we go.

0:52What would happen

0:53is if you went to a new line you'd have to

0:55do it again. You kept on having to do this

0:59if you just wanted the comment to go on

1:01multiple lines. In this latest version they

1:04've done this

1:06which is great. You can just do a forward

1:08slash and a star. Say what you'd like to

1:10say.

1:11I can't type to say. Carry on on a new line

1:17and keep going like a boss.

1:23And then to close the comment you can just

1:25go on a new line, star, backslash and boom

1:28we have

1:28multi-line comments. This is great. You can

1:30actually have nice looking comments all

1:33done

1:33nicely in one place. Nothing fancy required

1:35and this is a great feature. It's available

1:38on desktop

1:38and online and Tableau server as well in

1:41the browser. So this is going to be coming

1:43to all

1:43versions of Tableau that you're going to be

1:46using. So this is a great quality of life

1:48improvement. I

1:48can't tell you how many times I've wanted

1:50this feature. What I hope you don't get is

1:53people

1:53writing whole paragraphs in the comments

1:55boxes but hey ho this is always going to

1:56happen when

1:57people want to document everything properly

1:59. So that's pretty much it. That's the

2:00feature

2:00in a nutshell. Very very simple. Great

2:02quality of life improvement. If you've

2:04enjoyed the video you

2:05know what to do. If not hit the dislike

2:07button twice and I'll catch you in the next

2:08one.

Rollup

Tableau's calculation editor now supports block comments, letting you comment out or annotate multiple lines at once instead of prefixing every line individually.

Comments in Tableau calculations previously had to be added one line at a time, which was tedious for anything longer than a single line. This is shown in the browser but works the same in desktop.

The Breakdown

The old one-line-at-a-time method 0:21

Previously, commenting required a forward slash at the start of every line; moving to a new line meant repeating it, which got tedious for multi-line notes.
Open a block comment 1:01

In a calculation, type forward slash and star to start a block comment, then write your comment text, continuing onto new lines without needing to re-mark each one.
Close the block comment 1:24

End the block by starting a new line with a star and backslash. Everything between the opening and closing marks is treated as one comment, giving you a clean, self-contained annotation block.
Where it works 1:41

This syntax works on desktop, Tableau Online and Tableau Server in the browser, so it's usable wherever you write calculations, not just in one product.

Worth Knowing

Available from version 2020.4 onwards.
The feature makes it easy to write long documentation in comments, but that doesn't mean you should overdo it with whole paragraphs.

Use It When

Reach for this whenever you need to document or temporarily disable multiple lines of a calculation, rather than commenting each line separately.

How this Rollup was made provenance & method

A Rollup is drafted by AI from the video's transcript, then reviewed and edited by Tim. Everything used to produce this one is listed below — the model, the exact prompt, and the source video — so the process is transparent and reproducible.

Transcription: On-device — NVIDIA Parakeet v3 for recent videos, OpenAI Whisper large-v3 for earlier ones. The transcript never leaves the machine or gets published.
Drafting: Claude Sonnet 5 in the cloud, from that transcript.
Prompt: The exact Rollup prompt (v2) — the full system prompt, unedited.
Source video: Watch on YouTube
Drafted: 5 July 2026 at 09:38
Reviewed & edited: 5 July 2026 at 09:41 · by Tim Ngwena

Model + prompt + video is everything you'd need to recreate a Rollup like this yourself. The one thing we don't share is the transcript.

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