When designing a dashboard, some of the first questions you'll often ask yourself are: How will my audience view this dashboard? What kind of device will they use? With the wide adoption of mobile devices, this question becomes very important because what looks great on a large flat screen monitor doesn't always look great on a tablet or phone.

The top of the Dashboard tab on the left sidebar reveals a button to preview the dashboard on various devices, as well as a drop-down for Size options:

Clicking the Device Preview button not only allows you to see how your dashboard will look with various device types (and even specific models), but also allows you to add a layout for each device type, which you can customize:

You can not only see how your dashboard will appear on various devices and models, but also how it will look based on the orientation of the device and whether the Tableau Mobile app is used (if available for the selected device).

Clicking the Add Layout button (that is, the Add Tablet Layout button in the preceding screenshot) will add a layout under the Dashboard tab on the left sidebar:

Each layout can have its own size and fit options, and the layout options allow you to switch from Default to Custom. This gives you the ability to rearrange the dashboard for any given layout. You may even remove views and objects for a certain layout. For example, you might simplify a dashboard to one or two views for a phone while leaving three or four in place for a desktop display.

The Chapter 07 Completed workbook contains an example of the profit analysis dashboard and has a couple of layout options. For example, here is that dashboard formatted for display on a phone in which the dashboard will fit according to the width of the phone and allow for scrolling up and down:

As you can see, the arrangement of the dashboard for the phone means that Profit by State and Profit Trend do not appear within the preview boundaries for a phone device. However, they are only a finger swipe away.