You may have discovered how useful actions can be in Tableau. You can use URL actions to connect views of data to external resources such as maps, customer data, and more. Moreover, you can use filter actions to connect multiple Tableau worksheets into an analytical flow. Filter actions are often most effective when you combine multiple sheets onto a single dashboard. And finally, you can add highlight actions. This article describes these actions in detail.
Filter action from one worksheet to another
Unlike URL actions that link to external resources, filter actions send information to other Tableau worksheets. For example, below are two views from the same workbook. The scatter plot on the left (Sheet 1) shows the relationship between square footage and price of houses sold in a specific area. That view is linked to the map view on the right (Sheet 2) using a Filter Action. For any selected house in the scatter plot, you can see other houses on the map that are comparable to it.
Activating the filter action (right-click on the mark to select the filter action) automatically jumps you from one worksheet to the next.
To add Filter action to a worksheet:
- Select Worksheet > Actions, then click Add Action.
Filter action within a dashboard
Now look at these same views, but this time within the context of a dashboard. The dashboard below has the same two views from the example above: the scatter plot and the map. This time, when you activate the filter action, the views are updated directly in the dashboard. For example, select a house in the scatter plot below.
As you explore, you can continue to drill into more information because all of the views have been connected using filter actions. Filter actions can even filter across different data sources.
Add a new filter action to a dashboard using Use as Filter from a worksheet
A worksheet within a dashboard can be used as a filter, by activating the Use As Filter option. This option will auto generate an action that will filter all worksheets on the dashboard. You can learn how to enable Use as Filter, view the auto generated action, and edit the action from the Action dialog box.
For information, see the Filter Actions Knowledge base article. This article shows you how to edit the action from the Action dialog box, which enables you to change the behavior of the action with the added flexibility of targeting specific sheets.
Add a new filter action to a dashboard
You can manually add a new filter action if you do not want to use the Use as Filter option. Adding a filter action manually allows you the flexibility to choose which individual sheets to have filter by the action, whereas Use as Filter filters all the sheets within a dashboard. Filter actions can even filter across different data sources.
For more information, see Filtering Across Multiple Data Sources.
To add a new filter action to a dashboard:
- Select Dashboard > Actions, then click Add Action.
- In the Edit Filter Action dialog box, give the filter a descriptive name.
- Select the Source Sheets, Target Sheets, and fields to filter.
- Select Hover, Select, or Menu as the trigger to run the action, and then click OK.
For more information, see Filter Actions in the Tableau Desktop Help.
Highlight action within a dashboard
Highlight actions are particularly useful on a dashboard where the highlight provides rich visual interaction between the views on the sheet. Based on the data selection, the related data is highlighted in a variety of other views based on your selection in the current view.
The Highlight Actions article covers how to add a dashboard action to create the highlight action. Alternatively, you can add a highlight action by using a highlight action on a Color legend like Region or a Shape legend like Products as show in the example below.
By default, when adding a sheet that has a legend, the highlight action is enabled to highlight all views when a data selection is made. When a selection is made, an auto generated highlight action is created within the Dashboard Actions menu. This is where you can then edit the highlight action. To disable the highlight action, you can remove the action from the Dashboard Actions menu or remove the selection for the highlighter on the Color or Shape legend.
URL action within a dashboard
A URL action is a hyperlink that points to a webpage, file, or other web-based resource outside of Tableau. You can use URL actions to link to more information about your data that may be hosted outside of your data source. For example on your organization’s network or on the web.
To point to a webpage object within a dashboard, add a webpage object to the dashboard and specify the URL, then edit the URL Action to include a URL. If you run the URL action, this webpage will automatically update within the dashboard rather than opening in a web browser. If the URL requires any permissions to access, authentication is handled through the webpage, not by Tableau.
Note: If you will publish a dashboard that contains a URL action, a best practice is to use the https:// protocol with URL actions. If you use http:// in the URL action, and the server on which you publish the dashboard serves files through https://, browsers will not be able to display the external http:// page that the URL action points to.
To make the link relevant to your data, you can substitute field values of a selection into the URL as parameters. In other words, you can send information about each selected mark or filter setting to a given URL. In the example below, "Product Category" was inserted into the Yahoo.com search URL. Doing this filters the web page object within the dashboard by Product Category. If a web page object is added, then when the URL action is called, it will be rendered in Tableau (the web page object) versus going to an external page.
