Innovative Tableau

Chapter 91. How to Change Sort Order with Buttons in Tableau

Sorting marks within bar charts in ascending or descending order is good practice because it allows you to compare not only the preattentive attribute of height (or length), but also rank. By default, Tableau allows an end user to sort bar charts in ascending, descending, or data source order, but the functionality has several limitations, such as:

• Its appearance is very subtle and often goes overlooked.
• There are no formatting options.
• The sort does not work across multiple sheets.

The following technique overcomes all three of these limitations. This chapter shows you how to change the sort order of multiple sheets at the same time with the click of a button!

How to Simultaneously Change the Sort Order Across Multiple Sheets

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to toggle the sort between descending and ascending by clicking an up or down triangle, respectively:

Step 1

Create a parameter with a data type of Integer and two values; one for descending and one for ascending. The values need to be 1 and –1, but you can set the Display As to whatever you want:

Step 2

Create a calculated field that equals the value 1. Whenever I create a calculated field containing one value, I like to add the aggregation of ...