Innovative Tableau

Chapter 97. 3 Innovative Ways to Use Set Actions: Tip 3

How to Create Persistent Comparison Sets

Comparisons help us find and communicate insights in Tableau, and segmentation (a type of comparison) is one of the best ways to make those insights actionable. So why not combine these tactics by allowing dashboard users to create custom comparison sets that are relevant to them? This is a user experience that was improved dramatically with the introduction of set actions which allow you to create sets by simply interacting with dimension members on a dashboard. These custom sets persist across dashboard views, providing an opportunity to make use of the same sets across multiple analyses.

This chapter shows you how to design set actions to create persistent comparison sets, but also how to use those comparison sets to provide a visual cue to your audience that reminds them what they have selected and the calculations required to compare a focus dimension member to the comparison set.

How to Create Segments on the Fly with Set Actions

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to create the comparison on the left side of this dashboard, on the fly, by selecting dimension members from the scatter plot:

To get started, let’s make the scatter plot view that serves as the foundation of the first dashboard. Scatter plots are one of my favorite actionable dashboard elements, and you ...