Dude, Where’s My S(C)roll b(ar)?

Anyone remember this move straight from the Millenium? Heavens, time flies.

Anyways, I kinda felt like the guys in the movie today. After weeks of work on Tableau Desktop, I uploaded a Dashboard for final release. It was meant to be shared with a wide audience on our Tableau Cloud instance.

Some checks here, some checks there, all looking great but then it happend.

I clicked one of my menu buttons. It uses dynamic zone visibility to display a selection menu. This menu can be quite extensive so it has scroll bars, or so it should have…

Dude, Where’s my Scroll bar?

The scroll bar just didn’t show. My first idea was that it must be related to dynamic zone visibility. Not that I had any idea why but well, I used it and there are some challenges with it so maybe, I had encountered something?

Trying a workaround (in the literal sense, I had to work around a lot. There was a reason for me using DynViz after all) by using the basic show/hide button on the menu container did not do any good. The scroll bar just wouldn’t show.

Neither did all variants of fit, standard… even removing and readding the sheet(s) did nothing. Nothing would help. The scroll bar showed in Tableau Desktop but not on Tableau Cloud.

So, as a last resort I simply floated the sheet in question straight on my dashboard and…. again, no scroll bar (you didn’t really think this would have helped, did you?).

But! It did give me an idea after all.

I found the s(c)roll b(ar)!

Turns out the problem was in my sheet. My sheet was jsut a list of names, name dimension on rows, that’s it.

Since this gives the well known “ABC” cells, I used the somewhat strange but still working trick of selecting the right cell line, keep ctrl pressed, press arrow right 3 times. Then use your mouse to minimize the cell size, click it again, keep ctrl pressed and click left arrow on your keyboard 5 times.. this removes the cells.

And this was also where the devil hid in the details. Seemingly, whilst Tableau Desktop does not see an issue with this approach and will show scrollbars, Tableau Cloud does not like it. Turning the marks from Text to Polygon to make them seemingly go blank is less elegant but works also on Tableau Cloud.

Summary

If you need to to have a scroll bar on a long sheet that just displays dimension members row by row and you intend to publish it to a Tableau Cloud instance, don’t use the ctrl+ arrow keys approach. Use another option, Jeff shaffer many years ago listed several on his blog.

And that’s it for today,

I hope you find that useful and maybe it will spare pulling out hair for one or the other.

Until next time.

Steffen