Tableau Desktop and Web Authoring Help

Add context and interactivity to your data by using actions. Users interact with your visualizations by selecting or hovering over marks or selecting a link in a tooltip menu. The actions you set up can respond with navigation and changes in the view.

For example, in a dashboard showing home sales by neighborhood, actions can show relevant information for a selected neighborhood. Selecting a neighborhood in one view can trigger highlighting a map, filtering a list of sold houses, and opening a web page of relevant census data. For related information and examples, see A Rough Guide to Dashboard Actions(Link opens in a new window) on the Tableau Public blog.

Types of actions

There are several types of actions, each with a different purpose:

• Filter. Use the data from one view to filter data in another.
• Highlight. Call attention to marks of interest by dimming all others.
• Go to URL. Create hyperlinks to external resources, such as a web page or file.
• Go to Sheet. Simplify navigation to other worksheets, dashboards, or stories in the same workbook.
• Change Parameter. Let users change parameter values by directly interacting with marks on a viz.
• Change Set Values. Let users change the values in a set by directly interacting with marks on a viz.

Order of operations

Actions are carried out by Tableau in a specific order:

1. Parameter
2. Set
3. Filter
4. Go to sheet
5. Highlight
6. Go to URL

Within each type, actions are performed in alphabetical order. That is, if there are two filter actions, "A Filter Action" is performed before "This is a Filter".

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