How to unhide a card in Tableau

If you’ve accidentally or intentionally hidden a card in your Tableau Worksheet and can’t figure out how to unhide it, Jack Wallen is here to reveal how easy that task is.

So you’ve worked hours and maybe even days creating the perfect Tableau Dashboard to visualize massive troves of data. Everything looks perfect, and you’re ready to show off that work to the higher-ups.

But wait: Something is missing. There’s a card you know you added, and it’s a must-have for those you report to. Without that card, your dashboard won’t deliver the data visualization those in power must see.

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What do you do?

Don’t panic. Most likely what’s happened is the card in question has been hidden. Hiding a card is actually quite simple, as all you need to do is click the drop-down associated with the card and then select the Hide entry (Figure A).

Figure A

You might have hidden that card by mistake or wanted to temporarily hide it on purpose. Once you’ve done that, unhiding it isn’t nearly as intuitive as you might think. Fortunately, however, the fix is quite simple… once you know where it is.

Let me show you how it’s done.

What you’ll need

To follow along with this, you’ll need a Tableau account and at least one Sheet with cards already added. You can use the sample data set to practice this if you need it, although it’s so easy you probably won’t need much in the way of practice. Let’s unhide some cards.

How to unhide a card

Say you’ve created a KPI Filter card that somehow managed to become hidden from sight. That card still exists — it’s just not visible.

To unhide that card, click the Show/Hide Cards drop-down in the toolbar near the top (Figure B).

Figure B

When you click the drop-down, you’ll see a number of sub-menus (Filters, Highlights, Parameters – Figure C).

Figure C

You’ll need to know the type of card that has been hidden. In my case, the KPI card is of the type “Filter.” If I click the Filter sub-menu, my KDI card is right there (Figure D).

Figure D

Click the KPI entry and the card will unhide (Figure E).

Figure E

Believe it or not, that’s all there is to unhiding a card in Tableau. It was only a matter of knowing where the Show/Hide Card button is and selecting the proper entry from the right sub-menu.

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