Tableau Consumer Basics: Use Tableau’s Custom Views to Save a Filtered Version of a Dashboard

Contributed by: Christopher Gardner

Difficulty level: Easy

Tableau is a fantastic data visualization tool that provides valuable insights into your company’s data. As a data consumer, you are probably familiar with the charts and graphs provided by the analysts within your company; however, there are many features within Tableau designed specifically with the end user in mind. In this Shortcut, we’ll be looking at custom views.

Imagine you are the regional manager of a large corporation. You are interested in the data about your region, and fortunately, the central data analytics team has just provided an informative dashboard full of charts and graphs. To meet your needs, and those of the other regional managers, they developed the dashboard with a wide variety of filters and parameters to narrow the data down to specifically what each manager might need.

Unfortunately, this means that every time you visit this dashboard, you need to reapply all those filters to make it show information specific to your region. This is where custom views come into play. Custom views are a version of any dashboard with filters, highlights, and parameters already saved. They can be made by anyone with view access to the dashboard and each user can have many different saved custom views. They can be shared with others and your default version of the dashboard can be set to one of these views. Let’s take ...