Innovative Tableau

Chapter 4. Button Dashboard Object

In Tableau Desktop 2018.3, Tableau gave us the long-overdue Button dashboard object! Before this new object was released, adding buttons to a dashboard required a clever combination of worksheets and dashboard actions. I say this feature was long overdue because before it came out, this was my second-most-popular blog post, ever.

When a hack is that popular, it is time to make it a standard feature in the product. Fortunately for us, one source of Tableau’s innovation is truly its user base. Not only do the developers listen to the community, they even have an Ideas space on Tableau community forums where user ideas are collected, voted on, and updated as each successful idea’s status transitions from submittal to production.

This chapter shows you how to use one of Tableau’s newest dashboard objects to link to dashboards or worksheets within the same workbook.

How to Use the Button Dashboard Object in Tableau

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, I credit much of my success with Tableau to its free tool, Tableau Public. Tableau Public provides a source of inspiration, a platform for creating a data visualization portfolio, a sandbox for trying new ideas, and a treasure trove of tactics to reverse engineer that so that you can incorporate approaches into your own work.

For these reasons, several of the tutorials in Innovative Tableau are illustrated using the following Tableau Public workbook that I affectionately call Super Sample Superstore:

You can download the workbook if you want to follow along and then, in the lower-right corner of the window, click the Download button.

The workbook contains three dashboards: Explanatory for a high-level overview, Actionable to reveal insights that can cause action, and Annotations to add custom commentary.

For this example, let’s add a button to the Actionable dashboard:

At the bottom of the dashboard, you can see custom insights and recommendations that have been added by an analyst (see Chapter 84). You also see a link to add those annotations in the top navigation (see Chapter 72), but because our user likely hasn’t previously seen this option, let’s add an extra button to guide them to the Annotations dashboard.

To add a button that links to another sheet within the same workbook, go to the Dashboard pane on the left side of the main Dashboard interface, and then, from the Objects area, simply drag a Button object onto a dashboard:

Note

Starting in Tableau version 2020.1, the Button object was renamed Navigation.

In this example, I have added a floating Button object to the Actionable dashboard within the Super Sample Superstore workbook. By default, you will see a big gray button appear. These buttons can be made of images or text. You can also choose which sheet a button links to, change the formatting options, and even inform the user what the button does via its tooltip.

To access all of these options, select the Button object, click the down arrow that appears on the right of the object and then, from the drop-down menu that opens, choose Edit Button:

The Edit Button dialog box opens in which you can configure the navigation and formatting for the button.

For this example, I set up the button to appear as an image of a speech bubble, link to the Annotations dashboard, and provide a call to action in the tooltip:

After you click OK to accept these settings, you can switch to the Layout pane where you can control the button’s size and location on the dashboard (assuming that the Button object is floating):

Now, when a user hovers over the button, the call to action displays, encouraging them to add their own commentary. If they click the button, it brings them to the Annotations dashboard within the workbook! You can test out the user experience of a button by going into Presentation mode within Tableau Desktop (by clicking F7).

The Button dashboard object is a welcome update for linking within the same workbook. However, if you need to link outside of the workbook, your best bet is to add an Image object, instead, and then set the object’s Target URL.