Enhance Your Visuals — How to Remove / Get Rid of the ‘Abc’ Column in Tableau…

A step by step guide on removing the ‘Abc’ populated column from your visuals. 4 different ways you can get rid of the ‘Abc’ column in Tableau.

Photo by Diomari Madulara on Unsplash

How to remove the ‘Abc’ column? - might be the most commonly asked Tableau question.

If you are a regular Tableau user, you would have invariably, come across a situation wherein you have had a column with ‘Abc’ listed out in your visual like below, and no matter what you do, this column just wouldn’t get erased.

‘Abc’ column in a simple table in Tableau

You cannot delete the column, nor can you Exclude it (a popular Tableau feature used to filter values - rows or columns, out of consideration, and the view).

And while there is no direct method to delete the column, there are however a couple of workarounds to hide it.

Workaround 1 — Convert the ‘Mark type’ to Polygon

Step 1 — Build your visual / table / crosstab