Unable to Show More Than 16 Rows or Columns

Issue

Unable to place more than sixteen (16) fields on the Rows or Columns shelf without the fields and field labels (headers) concatenating.

Environment

Tableau Desktop

Resolution

Option 1

Upgrade to Tableau 2019.4 or later. Click here for downloads of current and previous versions of Tableau Desktop: Tableau Desktop Downloads and Release Notes. For more information on current releases, see Upgrade Tableau Desktop and Desktop Upgrade.

Option 2

If you cannot upgrade to Tableau Version 2019.4 or later, use the following workaround:

Divide the view into two separate sheets with fewer than sixteen fields on the Rows shelf on each sheet.
Create a dashboard.
Place both sheets onto the dashboard next to one another.

Cause

The ability to place more than 16 fields on the Rows shelf without the fields concatenating was not built into the Tableau product until version 2019.4.

With the launch of 2019.4 the limit was raised from 16 to 50 for “Maximum Rows Labels” and “Maximum levels of horizontal row labels”. The “Maximum levels of columns” labels continues to be 16. Users can build wide tables in Tableau with up to 50 fields on the Rows shelf (i.e. have up to 50 columns in their table).