> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.vizney.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# How to Add a Placeholder to Your Tableau Data Source
- URL: https://www.vizney.com/add-placeholder-to-tableau-data-source/
- Published: 2024-08-05T09:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-12-15T10:05:05.000Z
- Description: This method explains how to connect Placeholder data, giving you more flexibility—similar to Excel—and enabling a broader range of visualizations.
- Author: Yehwan Hwang
- Tags: Knowledge Base

**Tableau** offers a lot more flexibility than other BI tools, but it can still be tricky to replicate the variety of grid chart (table) formatting options you get in **Excel**.

This post will walk you through a basic setup to help overcome this limitation, and later, I'll cover how to build different visualizations using this approach.

### Step-by-Step: Adding Placeholder

1. Create the **Placeholder.csv** file using Excel.

[PlaceholderPlaceholder.csv81 Bytesdownload-circle](https://www.vizney.com/content/files/2025/12/Placeholder.csv "Download")

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6a/50/6a50f03c-1922-4e90-bf18-c5abd0f819d4/content/images/2024/09/Placeholder-file.png)

1. Add a Text file connection to your existing data source and link the **Placeholder.csv** file you created.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6a/50/6a50f03c-1922-4e90-bf18-c5abd0f819d4/content/images/2024/09/Add-Connections.png)

1. Drag a table to the canvas.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6a/50/6a50f03c-1922-4e90-bf18-c5abd0f819d4/content/images/2024/09/Relation.png)

1. Use the condition `1=1`, which is always true, to set up the relationship.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6a/50/6a50f03c-1922-4e90-bf18-c5abd0f819d4/content/images/2024/09/Relationship-Calculation.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6a/50/6a50f03c-1922-4e90-bf18-c5abd0f819d4/content/images/2024/09/Edit-relationship.png)

💡

Creating this always-true relationship allows you to use data from both sources without any restrictions.