Innovative Tableau

Chapter 86. How to Make Color-Coded Navigation Using Dashboard Actions

As is often the case, new client requirements inspire new approaches that are made possible through Tableau’s flexibility. In one such instance, a need came up to create a navigation that doubles as a color legend. You can set up color legends to highlight dimension members, but this navigation needed to filter. A filter alone wouldn’t work because filters don’t include color encoding.

So let’s combine the two using a highlight table and dashboard actions! This approach provides several benefits including formatting flexibility, improved dashboard processing time, and—what this section is all about—a better user experience.

If you are familiar with this technique, you likely know that the Square mark type can limit your ability to make nice, evenly sized rectangles that fill all the available space in each cell of the highlight table. This tutorial shows you a trick for getting around that, too, producing perfect rectangles every time!

How to Convert a Highlight Table into a Navigation + Color Legend

To illustrate how to combine a navigation and color legend using a highlight table with dashboard actions, we re-create the following small dashboard. This dashboard uses a Tableau dual-axis waterfall chart (Chapter 37) to show how profit is trending in the Sample – Superstore dataset:

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