# Hacks in Tableau: Friday thoughts Episode 4

> 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:** 2021-09-24
- **Format:** Video · 18 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Tool strategy, Data visualisation
- **Tools:** Tableau (dashboards, maps, parameters)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/hacks-in-tableau-friday-thoughts-episode-4
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-3EPkXaPv4

This is a Friday thoughts opinion piece where I talk through my problem with Tableau "hacks" — those clever workarounds we use to bend the product into doing things it wasn't built for. I explain why I rarely make videos teaching them, using sheet swapping, set actions and map layers as examples.

## Key takeaways

- Sheet swapping (using a parameter to enable and disable sheets in a container) is presented in documentation as a feature, but a 12-step process to show and hide a chart is really a hack masking a missing UI capability
- Hacks let Tableau get away with not improving the layout and formatting system, where authors spend 50-60% of their time
- Set actions and map layers got hijacked for user-interface tricks, exposing how siloed product teams ship features for one chart type rather than holistically
- Hacks hurt performance at enterprise scale — they sit hidden inside workbooks with no flag, and become a problem when Tableau later changes the underlying behaviour
- Hacks are hard to hand over and maintain, behaving like Excel's VBA black boxes when the original author moves on without religious documentation

## Chapters

- 0:00 What I mean by hacks
- 0:46 Sheet swapping: feature or hack
- 2:29 Performance and the neglected layout system
- 4:14 Set actions hijacked for UI
- 5:52 Map layers and product silos
- 9:46 How hacks damage the product long term
- 11:49 Performance and handover at enterprise scale
- 14:27 Closing thoughts and channel update

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/hacks-in-tableau-friday-thoughts-episode-4

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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