Bye Bye Baby Blues

How to remove Tableau’s auto blue highlight on text boxes

(in 3 easy steps and no dashboard actions or calculations!)

We all love to hate the blue highlight in Tableau dashboards. It’s helpful to be reminded of what we clicked on, but not so helpful that it can’t be customized.

People have found ways around this in the past:

• Tesselation (with Highlight and Filter Actions)

But I wanted to offer another workaround that I stumbled upon for text boxes specifically.

Go to or create your sheet with the desired text and values on labels. Notice when you click on the text it automatically highlights it in blue. Set the sheet to fit Entire view.

Now let the magic begin!

1) Change it to a Shape in the Marks card, selecting the unfilled square

2) Size the shape to the max it’ll go