Tableau Desktop and Web Authoring Help

Actions often have unique behaviour when the source or destination is a dashboard. Because a dashboard can contain multiple views, a single filter or highlight action can have broad impact. Dashboards can also contain web page objects, which you can target with interactive URL actions.

Use a single view to filter other views in a dashboard

Imagine you have a dashboard that contains three views about profitability: a map, a bar chart, and a table of customer names. You can use a filter action to make one of the views in your dashboard, such as the map, the controlling view for the filter action. When your users select a region in the map, the data in the other views is filtered so that it relates to just that region.

1. On the dashboard, select the view you want to use as a filter.

2. In the shortcut menu of the view, choose Use as Filter. You can perform the same action by clicking the Use as Filter icon .

You can also use filter actions to filter the data on a dashboard when the data comes from multiple data sources. For more information, see Filtering Across Multiple Data Sources Using a Parameter(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau Knowledge Base.

For more information about filter actions, see Filter Actions(Link opens in a new window).

Use multiple views to filter other views in a dashboard

Just as you can use a single view to filter other views in a dashboard, you can also use multiple views as a filter. The trick is to not only use these views as filters, but to also disable their ability to be filtered themselves.

1. Create or open a dashboard that has at least three views.

   

2. Select the first view that you want to use as a filter (such as a map), and from its shortcut menu, select Use as Filter.

   

3. Open the same view's shortcut menu again and select Ignore Actions. This ensures that other filter actions, including the one you'll create next, will not affect this view.

   

4. Repeat the steps 2 and 3 for any other views you want to use as a filter.

   Now, selecting marks in these controlling views filters data in one or more detail views – all without affecting any other controlling views.

   

Navigate from one view to another view, dashboard or story

Use the Go to Sheet action to let users quickly navigate to a related visualisation – a dashboard, sheet, or story – when they click on a mark or a tooltip menu item in the original view.

Note: To simply navigate from one dashboard to another, without requiring users to interact with data, consider using the Navigation object.

1. From your dashboard, select Dashboard > Actions.

2. In the Actions dialog box, click Add Action and then select Go to Sheet.

   

3. Specify a name for the action. (If you choose to run the action using a tooltip menu, the name you specify here is what the tooltip displays.)

   

4. Select a source sheet that will initiate the action.

5. Specify how people viewing your dashboard will run the action. Select or Menu are the best choices for a navigation action.

   If you choose Select, consider selecting Single-select only so users won't navigate away from the view when multiple marks are selected.

6. For the target sheet, select the navigation destination that appears when users click marks or tooltip menu items in the source sheet. Then click OK.

Interactively display a web page in a dashboard (Create in Tableau Desktop)

To interactively display information from the web inside a dashboard, you can use a URL action with a web page object. For example, you might have a dashboard that shows profits by country. In addition to showing the profit data in your dashboard, you also want to display supplemental information about the countries from a web site.

Tip: To easily organise and target multiple web page objects in a dashboard, rename them.

1. Drag a Web Page object onto your dashboard, and enter a URL.

   

2. From your dashboard, select Dashboard > Actions.

3. In the Actions dialog box, click Add Action and then select Go to URL.

4. Specify a name for the link. If you choose to run the action using a menu, such as a menu option on a tooltip, the name you specify here is what's displayed.

   

5. Under Source Sheets, select the view or data source that will initiate the action. For example, if you want the action to be initiated when a user clicks a link on a map's tooltip, select the map view.

6. Specify whether people viewing your dashboard will run the action on hover, select, or menu. For details, see Running Actions.

7. Enter the URL, starting with the http:// or https:// prefix, such as http://www.example.com.

   You can use field values as parameters in your URL. For example, if Country is a field used by a view in your dashboard, you can use <Country> as a parameter in your URL. For details, see URL Actions(Link opens in a new window).

   

8. For URL Target, select Web Page Object, and select the object you created in step 1.

   When you launch the action, a web page automatically loads within the dashboard rather than opening a separate browser window.