Tableau Desktop Pocket Reference

Chapter 10. Filters

Tableau is built on a patented technology called VizQL, which translates what a user is dragging and dropping onto the view into database queries like those in Structured Query Language (SQL). The result of those queries is then reflected on the view as a data visualization. Instead of using a series of WHERE clauses as you would in SQL, a Tableau user can filter out marks on a view by dragging and dropping a field onto the Filters shelf and setting their criteria in user-friendly dialogs. This chapter explains the four core types of Tableau filters, options for scaling filters across a workbook, and how to understand Tableau’s filter order of operations.

Types of Filters

Tableau allows a user to filter marks on a view based on measure values or dimension members. You can also filter rows from the dataset before arriving in the Authoring interface with a data source or extract filter. In Chapter 9, we discovered a correlation between average profit and average discount. If we want to focus on only the states with a profit of less than zero, we can drag the Profit measure from the Data pane to the Filters shelf, which will create our first measure filter. 

Upon adding a measure to the Filters shelf, Tableau will ask you to choose the aggregation of the measure. As with the fields we’ve added to the Rows shelf and Columns shelf, this aggregation is done at the visualization level of detail. In the case of our scatter plot, the most granular level of the analysis ...