Profile Organization in Tableau Public — How I’m Using the New Feature to Showcase My Data Viz Portfolio
For many years, visualizations on a Tableau Public profile were only sorted by date published. Last year, a feature was added to organize them into categories with AI — but I found this feature did not give me the control I wanted (and needed) over the appearance of my profile, so I did not use it.
Now, the second iteration of this feature is live and I’m excited to finally use it — manual categorization! With over 154 vizzes and counting, I’m excited to finally be able to bucket them how I want — allowing me to both showcase my best work and also make it a little easier to hunt down specific things I’ve published over the years.
I’ve enabled the feature on my own profile (https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/brrosenau/vizzes) — keep reading to learn how to use the feature yourself and how I approached setting up categories.
Enabling the Feature
On your Tableau Public profile, click “Organize Your Vizzes”
Note: you must have at least 10 visualizations published (and visible, not hidden) and be on a web browser sized at least 1080p for this to show up
The option to Organize your Vizzes appears. Note in the upper left, you can toggle between “Categories” and “Date Published”. Clicking “Date Published will revert to the default ordering — but if you’ve done any work organizing into categories, that will be saved.
Creating Categories
You can try the AI Auto-Categorize, but in my experience this only works well if you’ve got a really clear and consistent naming system (for example, all your Makeover Monday vizzes have the words Makeover Monday in the title). Otherwise you can type in a category name in the box, and hit “Enter” to save the category. In my testing, there was not a limit on the number of categories (I gave up after 120) but the name must contain alphanumeric characters, and be six words or less.
There are two special categories — Recent and Other. These are colored with a light grey, and cannot be deleted or renamed. You can delete or rename any other category you create (this will not delete any vizzes you have in a category).
Additionally, all categories except for “Other” are reorderable — simply click the 6 dots on the far left of the rectangle and drag and drop to reorder.
Applying Categories to Vizzes
Once you’ve created a category, it’s time to add vizzes! There are two ways to do this. The first — click “Add Vizzes”
This brings up a pop up window that lists all your vizzes alphabetically. This method is good if want to multi select vizzes and have a good memory of what your vizzes are named (or have a good title convention, alas I do not). Once you’ve selected the ones you want to add, scroll all the way to the bottom and click “Save.”
The second method is individual — click on the three dots in the bottom right corner of the viz card, and then in the dropdown, check which categories you want to apply to your viz, and hit “Apply” to save. Vizzes can be in multiple categories! This method is slower, as you have to go one by one and the viz cards reload as you put them in their categories.
Note: within each category, vizzes are sorted by date published, which is not editable at the time this blog was written.
How I’ve set up my profile
For my profile, I wanted to strike a balance between creating categories that would not only be meaningful to me, but also useful for someone looking for a specific viz or general overview of my work.
To minimize the need to scroll to find something, I’ve put categories with less vizzes at the top, and larger categories near the bottom
Here are my initial categories:
- Recent (currently limiting myself to 4 vizzes here)
- Tutorials & Tools
- Color Palettes
- Tableau Conference Step Trackers
- Vizzes featured as #VizOfTheDay
- Iron Viz (both official submissions and vizzes related to Iron Viz)
- My Year in Review (still need to do 2024…whoops)
- #30DayChartChallenge
- Makeover Monday
- All Vizzes (I do still want to be able to scroll through all of mine chronologically while keeping categories on)
- Other
What categories should you start with? Consider grouping by community project, theme, or even a category of your personal favorites. If you’re actively looking for your next role, consider a category near the top of your profile showcasing work that could apply in a business setting. Can’t decide where to put a viz? Don’t hesitate to put them into more than one category.
Overall, I’m glad to finally have more control over how I present my Tableau Public work to the world, and am excited to see how this feature changes over time. Personally, I hope that I’ll eventually be able to link out to different categories, or see the list of someone’s categories at the top of their profile.
Bonus: Tableau Conference!
I’ll be in sunny San Diego for Tableau Conference April 15–17. If you’ll be there as well, please say hi if you see me! I won’t be presenting, but I’ll be attending sessions, cheering at Iron Viz, and hanging out in the Data Village. I’ll also be running (ba dum tss) the 4th annual Tableau Conference Step Tracker — and this year I’m bringing stickers. If you’d like to learn more about how to participate (in person or virtually) + give me feedback for this initiative, check out the blog post below. Hope to see you there!
