How to add short hyperlinks to your Tableau workbook

Here is a quick tip for everyone who uses hyperlinks in their Tableau workbooks but wants them to be short and neat. This may especially be useful for the #MakeoverMonday community as we ask people to state the data source information on their published vizzes and we always provide a link to the data source on our website.

Background

There are a couple of options for including hyperlinks and taking the viewer to the relevant website.

1. Add a text box to your viz and paste the full hyperlink into it
2. Add a calculated field containing the relevant text you want to display in a worksheet, then add the worksheet to your viz/dashboard and add a URL action
3. Use a transparent image and float it on top of the text, image or area of your viz that you want to link, then add a URL action to the transparent image

For the purpose of this blog, I will explain option 2, because I think it will be most useful for people.

How to do it

• create a new calculated field which contains the text you want to display. For this example, I will use my Twitter handle @TriMyData
• drag your newly created dimension onto a new worksheet as Text
• format the text so it will be easily recognised as a hyperlink: font colour #0000EE, underline
• add the worksheet to your dashboard (e.g. at the bottom as a footer)
• remove tooltip and command buttons from the worksheet
• add a URL action using the relevant hyperlink
• Done!

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