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Headers and Footers
Posted May 5th, 2008 by Joe
Hi-
I think it would be nice to have a Header and Foot option for printing. If you print several tabs to a PDF you could add a title and page numbering to the set. Right now we have to do this in Adobe...Kinda of a pain. I hope your new version will have improved printing options...Right now I see that as a major opportunity for improvement of an already great product.
Joe
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Comments
Agreed. And along those lines, it would be nice if there was a way to easily control how to break up big charts into multiple PDF pages (as opposed to just squeezing into one PDF page or using the page shelf).
Along the same lines as header/footers and a title page, a table of contents generated off of the tab names would be a nice addition.
What a good time to bring this up again. We definitely put some work into improving the printing experience in Tableau 4.0. You now have much more control over the printed output, including scaling over N x M pages, smart breaks, and Title/Caption (basically header/footer).
I don't know about that table of contents generation - do you have a situation where the primary consumption mode of Tableau analyses is by printing rather than, say, the free and interactive Tableau Reader?
Yes, we generate data analysis books which include hundreds of charts. It is a little unwieldy to present this data interactively so the books are presented as print materials.
Ideally, I would love to see a table of contents with hyperlinks to the individual charts. This sounds similar to what you are doing with the start page in 4.0. But it would be nice to be able export that as a true table of contents.
In Tableau 4.0, the new worksheet sorter does some of what you want -- it provides an array of thumbnails that link to the corresponding worksheets.
What I think would be nice would be some way to group worksheets in some logical outline, to make it easier to navigate workbook with many worksheets. It gets overwhelming sometimes. But I'd hate for something like that to complicate the user interface too much.
One workaround in 4.0 to get a navigable TOC is to use a dashboard to show the first worksheet in each section. Then just right click on a sheet on your TOC dashboard, select go to sheet, and you would page to the start of that section of worksheets.