Innovative Tableau

Chapter 75. How to Add a Cross-Workbook Menu

As a consultant, I’m often asked to consolidate many views onto a single dashboard, or even many dashboards within a single workbook. Putting too much in a single dashboard or workbook has several disadvantages, including less efficient processing, increased difficulty in managing fields, and loss of focus on answering the business question at hand.

My solution for handling the too many views on a single dashboard request is to strategically group the views into separate dashboards. In Chapter 72, I illustrate how to make an integrated navigation to link multiple dashboards together.

But sometimes this is not enough. Sometimes, the separate dashboards warrant their own workbooks, and your user interface should provide an intuitive way to link those workbooks together. This chapter shows you how to use dashboard actions to add a cross-workbook menu to a Tableau dashboard.

How to Navigate Users Between Tableau Workbooks

To illustrate adding a cross-workbook menu to a Tableau dashboard, in this chapter we build on the splash page-style dashboard that Chapter 73 describes. In this version, I’ve added the ubiquitous three-bullet, or ellipsis, more icons:

Hovering over the menu provides links to other workbooks on Tableau Online, Tableau Server, or Tableau Public. I normally prefer the bullet characters approach to my cross-workbook menu ...