Practical Tableau

Chapter 56. Three Creative Ways to Use Dashboard Actions

Dashboard actions, filters, and parameters are three of the best tactics to use in Tableau because they provide a way to hand over control of the analysis from you to your end users. This is critical in data visualization because it helps you allow discovery for your users and makes the insights they find easier to retain. In this chapter, we will share three different ways to leverage dashboard actions to improve your user experience.

A Primer on Tableau Dashboard Actions

Before we get to the three ideas on how to use dashboard actions, here’s a quick primer in case you are not familiar with this functionality. If you’re comfortable with the concept of dashboard actions, feel free to jump down to the first tip, “Tableau Dashboard Action #1: Use Every Sheet as a Filter”.

Dashboard actions in Tableau allow you to add logic to dashboard components that create actions somewhere else. For example, you can add logic that says, “If a user clicks on Dashboard Sheet 1, I want something to happen on Dashboard Sheet 2.” If you think about dashboard actions this way, their setup is very intuitive in Tableau. To set up a dashboard action, navigate to Dashboard → Actions in the top navigation from any dashboard view. A dialog box will appear, and when you click the button “Add Action >” in the lower-left corner, you will be presented with three options for the type of dashboard action that you want to add:

Filter

If you click sheet ...