Adding tabs to dashboards

Dashboard tabs let you do the following:

  • Better organize content: Group related visualizations and tiles into separate tabs.
  • Improve data storytelling: Guide viewers through different aspects of your data in a structured way.
  • Enhance performance: Load only the tiles on an active tab, potentially speeding up initial dashboard load times.
  • Reduce clutter: Consolidate multiple related analyses into a single dashboard.

This page includes the following sections:

User and instance requirements

To add tabs to dashboards, you must meet the following requirements:

  • Your Looker instance must be running Looker 26.4 or later.
  • You must have the Admin role to set a Maximum Dashboard Tabs limit for your Looker instance.

  • To make permanent changes to dashboards that all users will see, you must have the following access level and permissions:

  • To view dashboards, you must have the following access levels and permissions:

    Additionally, to view a specific dashboard tile, you must have access to the model that the tile is based on.

  • Optionally, users must also have the appropriate permissions to send, schedule, and download dashboards.

Limitations

Dashboard tabs have the following limitations:

  • The default maximum number of tabs is 5. Admins can set a different maximum number of tabs on the Content Guardrails Admin page.

  • Tiles on a tab will only start loading if a user clicks on the tab. For example, if a dashboard has 3 tabs and a user clicks the first and second tab, the tiles on those tabs will start loading. No tiles on tab 3 will load. Queries execute and queue in the order of the interaction. The per-user query limit still applies.

  • You cannot control user access to specific tabs.

  • You cannot specify different themes for different tabs.

  • You cannot download or print an individual tab.

Tabbed dashboard features for admins

Looker admins can choose to set a Maximum Dashboard Tabs limit instance-wide.

To set a Maximum Dashboard Tabs limit for your instance, follow these steps:

  1. In Looker, click the Admin option in the main navigation menu.
  2. Select the Content Guardrails option under the Performance section to open the Content Guardrails page.

  3. Enter a number into the Maximum Dashboard Tabs field to set a number of maximum tabs, or use the up and down arrows to set a number.

  4. Click Save to save the setting.

Tabbed dashboard features for developers

If you have the see_lookml_dashboards and develop permissions, as well as access to the LookML models for any data that you want to use, you can use the tabs parameter in conjunction with the tab_name parameter to add tabs to LookML dashboards.

See the LookML dashboard parameters page for more information about adding tabs to LookML dashboards.

Tabbed dashboard features for dashboard creators

Dashboard creators with appropriate access have the following option for adding tabs to dashboards:

Add tabs to user-defined dashboards

To add tabs to user-defined dashboards, follow these steps:

  1. Open any user-defined dashboard and switch to edit mode.
  2. Select the + Add button in the top navigation and select the Tabs option.
  3. Once a tab is created, select the Add button in the tab to add tiles.

You can also save a query tile to a specific dashboard tab directly from an Explore.

Delete tabs

To delete tabs, follow these steps:

  1. Open a tabbed dashboard and switch to edit mode.
  2. Select the three-dot menu for a tab, and select the Delete option.

Edit tabs

You can edit tabs in the following ways:

Rename tabs

To rename a tab, follow these steps:

  1. Open a tabbed dashboard and switch to edit mode.
  2. Double-click the tab name and rename the tab.

  3. Press the Enter key (PC) or Return key (Mac) to save the name.

Reorder tabs

To change the order of tabs on a user-defined dashboard, follow these steps:

  1. Open the tabbed dashboard and switch to edit mode.
  2. Select the three-dot menu for a tab, and select the > Move right or < Move left option.

Apply filters to tiles on different tabs

To apply filters to dashboard tiles that are on different tabs, follow these steps:

  1. Open a tabbed dashboard and switch to edit mode.
  2. Select the Filters button in the top navigation, and then select Add Filter.
  3. Configure the filter settings in the Add Filter window Settings tab.
  4. Select the Tiles To Update tab and select the tiles to apply the filter. If you don't want to apply the filter to a tile, select the Do Not Filter option from the tile's drop-down menu.

Move tiles to different tabs

To move a tile to a different tab, follow these steps:

  1. Open a tabbed dashboard and switch to edit mode.
  2. Select the three-dot menu for a tile, and select the Move to tab option.
  3. Select the name of a tab to move the tile.

Apply a quick layout

Quick layouts let you apply a cohesive tile configuration to tabs on a user-defined dashboard without the need to manually resize tiles. There are a few things to know about applying a quick layout to a dashboard with tabs:

  • You can apply a different quick layout to each tab.
  • Tile sizes change depending on the size of the dashboard.
  • Quick layout affects all tiles including text tiles, visualization tiles, Markdown tiles, and buttons.

Learn more about quick layouts.

Apply autorefresh to tiles that are on different tabs

To apply autorefresh for tiles that are on different dashboard tabs, follow these steps:

  1. Open a tabbed dashboard and switch to edit mode.
  2. Select the Settings button in the top navigation.
  3. On the General tab, select the Refresh every option from the Refresh frequency menu to set a refresh interval for the individual tiles on tabs.

Tabbed dashboard features for dashboard viewers

In addition to viewing content on tabbed dashboards, dashboard viewers with appropriate permissions can interact with tabbed dashboards in the following ways:

Download tabbed dashboards as a PDF

When you download a tabbed dashboard as a PDF, all of the tabs will appear in the same PDF. The contents of each tab will be organized under a content header with the name of the tab.

To get the link for a specific dashboard tab, click a tab and copy the browser URL.

Alternatively, you can get the entire dashboard link by selecting the Get link option from the dashboard's three-dot menu.