6.9.14 by InterWorks
We have updated our Power Tools branding. Any references to software/feature naming conventions may no longer be accurate in this article.

We’re running a blog series dedicated to helping you improve the performance of Tableau in your environment. It all starts with the Best Practice Analyzer from Workbook Tools for Tableau. This feature lets you know exactly how you can improve your Tableau workbooks to run faster and smoother.

Each post in the series is related to specific performance issues that are flagged by the Best Practice Analyzer. If you don’t have it yet, get it. You can also check out more guidelines found on our Tableau Performance Checklist.

Image or Shape Size Is Too Large

It seems your dashboard has been flagged due to a shape or image in your dashboard being greater than 50KB in size. This may present an issue. Your load times may now increase, depending on the number of marks being presented to Tableau for rendering.

For views with multiple marks, the file size of an export to PDF or image is also a performance consideration. An image export encodes your information by pixel while a PDF encodes by object. Each mark in a PDF is considered an object, so a multiple mark view can affect the PDF size unintentionally and slow the process.

Things to Consider

If you find that your shape or image is too large, you can verify a couple of things:

  1. You have the ability to make a shape larger using the Size shelf within Tableau Desktop, but the suggested size for shapes in Tableau is 32 x 32 pixels. Having a high-resolution file may not be necessary to achieve the desired result. See if a lower resolution gives adequate visual representation.
  2. If you desire to color your shape and use it within a visualization, it’s important to remember and verify that your image has a transparent background.

Custom Shapes

 

Curious about other Tableau workbook performance best practices? We have a growing list of posts to help you out. Here are the topics we’ve covered so far: