# Figma to Tableau: Accelerate Your Tableau Dashboard Design with Figma!

> 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:** 2024-07-09
- **Format:** Video · 45 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Tool strategy, Community
- **Tools:** Tableau (dashboards, extensions, formatting)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/figma-to-tableau-accelerate-your-tableau-dashboard-design-with-figma
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHeYJvp7Ju8

In the third part of my conversation with Tristan, he walks me through Figma to Tableau, a free tool he's built that decouples design, formatting and layout from the work of building a Tableau workbook. He demos exporting Figma designs straight to Tableau XML, swapping in live worksheets, and a generator for people who don't know Figma.

## Key takeaways

- Figma to Tableau converts a Figma design into real Tableau dashboard XML, recreating every zone, container and named element rather than flattening to a background image
- A Tableau workbook is just a zipped folder of XML plus data, so the plugin only needs the TWB to rewrite the layout without touching your connection or data
- You can import a TWB into Figma and have your worksheets auto-replace by name, then export a ready-styled dashboard in one click
- For non-Figma users there's a generator (still called 'templates') that builds dashboards from options like worksheet count, navigation, logos, colours and fonts
- Effects Tableau can't render natively, like rounded corners, shadows and gradients, can be exported as background images, which is how a lot of Tableau Public time gets saved

## Chapters

- 0:00 Why design and layout take too long
- 1:44 Where the Figma plugin idea came from
- 9:51 Demo: exporting a Figma design to Tableau
- 12:36 Importing workbooks and swapping sheets
- 18:17 Advanced designs and background images
- 21:04 The generator for non-Figma users
- 27:20 Building products through small iterations
- 33:50 Building a movement, not just a tool
- 36:07 The Tableau partner ecosystem and future

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/figma-to-tableau-accelerate-your-tableau-dashboard-design-with-figma

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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