Actions and Dashboards
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.
- On the dashboard, select the view you want to use as a filter.
- 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.
- Create or open a dashboard that has at least three views.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- From your dashboard, select Dashboard > Actions.
- In the Actions dialog box, click Add Action and then select Go to Sheet.
- 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.)
- Select a source sheet that will initiate the action.
- 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.
- 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.
- Drag a Web Page object onto your dashboard, and enter a URL.
- From your dashboard, select Dashboard > Actions.
- In the Actions dialog box, click Add Action and then select Go to URL.
- 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.
- 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.
- Specify whether people viewing your dashboard will run the action on hover, select, or menu. For details, see Running Actions.
- 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). - 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.