Innovative Tableau

Chapter 96. 3 Innovative Ways to Use Set Actions: Tip 2

How to Drill into a Single Row

Have you ever wanted to drill into a single row of a text table in Tableau? Tableau has nice hierarchy options that allow you to drill down and back up to get varying levels of detail for whatever you’re analyzing, but the drilldowns are all or nothing. So by default, if you wanted to click on a Category dimension member to reveal each category’s respective sub-categories, all the categories will display their sub-categories.

This default behavior becomes problematic with text tables because the number of rows becomes inflated with data that’s irrelevant to your analysis. This chapter shows you the three-step solution for drilling into a single dimension member to reveal underlying detail in Tableau.

The trick to clicking into a single row to expand to more detail involves either set actions (available as of Desktop 2018.3) or parameter actions (available as of Desktop 2019.2). Set actions are more flexible than parameter actions because:

• They allow you to do a multiselect (i.e., drill into one or more rows)

• You can use empty sets (parameters always have a current value selected)

• You can instruct Tableau what to do when a selection is cleared

For these reasons, let’s set up our drilldown using sets. Let’s pretend we’re using this table that looks at Sales, Profit Ratio, and Discount by Category from the Sample – Superstore dataset.

We want to drill into individual categories ...