How to Highlight in Tableau Dashboard

Building a Tableau dashboard is only half the battle, bringing it to life with interactivity is where the real value lies. One of the simplest yet most powerful ways to do this is by adding highlight actions. This guide will show you exactly how to set up highlights to make your dashboards more engaging and insightful for your audience.

What Are Highlight Actions in Tableau?

Highlight actions are a feature in Tableau that allows users to dynamically emphasize data points in one part of a dashboard by selecting related data points in another. When you interact with a "source" sheet (like clicking on a bar in a chart), it instantly highlights the corresponding marks in a "target" sheet (like the portion of a line on a line graph).

Imagine a dashboard showing a map of sales by state and a bar chart displaying your sales by product category. Without highlighting, they are just two separate charts. But with a highlight action, you can click on any state - say, Texas - and instantly see the portions of each product category bar that represent sales from Texas. It’s a simple interaction that immediately connects the dots, guiding the user’s eye and helping them understand the data more intuitively.

Why Use Highlighting? The Benefits of Guided Analysis

Adding highlights isn't just a design choice, it fundamentally improves how people interact with your data. It turns a static report into a dynamic analytical tool.

• Better User Experience: Interactive elements like highlighting make dashboards feel less intimidating and more like a tool to be explored. Users can follow their own curiosity without feeling overwhelmed by rows of data.
• Faster Insights: Instead of applying complex filters to isolate data, users can simply click. This visual connection helps them spot relationships, patterns, and outliers in seconds. "How does the West region contribute to our Office Supplies sales?" A single click can answer that question.
• Guided Storytelling: Highlights actively direct the viewer's attention. As they explore, they essentially create their own analytical story, making the dashboard more memorable and impactful.
• Easy Comparison: Highlighting is perfect for comparing a part to the whole. You can see not only that California is your top state for sales, but also how its product mix compares to the national average at a glance.

How to Create a Highlight Action: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let's walk through building a highlight action using Tableau's classic Superstore dataset. For this example, we’ll create a dashboard with two simple visualizations:

1. A bar chart showing Sales by Sub-Category.
2. A treemap showing Sales by Region.

Our goal is to click on a region in the treemap and see the corresponding sales highlighted in the sub-category bar chart.

Step 1: Build Your Dashboard

First, create your two worksheets. Once they're ready, create a new dashboard and drag both sheets onto the canvas. Arrange them however you like. At this point, they are just two independent charts sitting side-by-side.

Step 2: Open the Actions Menu

With your dashboard open, navigate to the main menu at the top of the Tableau window and click on Dashboard > Actions.... This will open the Actions dialog box, which is the control center for all interactivity on your dashboard.

Step 3: Add a New Highlight Action

In the bottom-left of the Actions window, you'll see a button that says Add Action >. Click this button and select Highlight... from the dropdown menu that appears. This opens the configuration window for your new highlight action.

Step 4: Configure the Highlight Action

This dialog box is where you tell an action what to do. It looks a bit complex at first, but it breaks down logically. Let’s go through each part:

Name

Give your action a descriptive name. This is helpful when you have multiple actions on a single dashboard. Let’s call ours: "Highlight Sub-Cat Sales by Region."

Source Sheets

This section defines where the action begins - which sheet will the user interact with? For our example, the user will be clicking on the treemap, so we'll check the box next to our "Sales by Region" sheet and uncheck everything else.

Run Action on

• Hover: The action runs when a user hovers their mouse over a mark. It's fast but can be visually busy.
• Select: The action runs when a user clicks on a mark. This is the most common choice, as it’s an intentional action. We'll use this.
• Menu: The action option appears in the tooltip menu when you hover over a mark. It's useful for providing users with multiple action options.

Choose Select for now.

Target Sheets

This is the sheet (or sheets) that will react and be highlighted. We want our "Sales by Sub-Category" bar chart to update when we click on the region map, so we'll check the box for that sheet.

Target Highlighting

This is the most critical setting. It tells Tableau how to connect the source and target sheets. You have two main options:

• All Fields: Tableau tries to match all shared fields between the source and target sheets. This can work for simple dashboards but sometimes leads to unexpected behavior.
• Selected Fields: This gives you precise control. You tell Tableau exactly which field to use for highlighting. In our case, the common field between our two sheets is Region. Click "Selected Fields," then in the box below, make sure Region is the field connecting both Source and Target.

Once everything is configured, click OK twice to close both dialog boxes.

Step 5: Test Your Action

Back on your dashboard, it's time to try it out! Click on any region in your treemap, like the "West" rectangle. You should instantly see the bars in your Sub-Category chart update. The portion of each bar representing sales from the West region will be highlighted in full color, while the rest fades into the background. You’ve just created an interactive dashboard!

Tips and Advanced Techniques

Once you've mastered the basics, you can apply highlighting in more creative ways.

Highlighting Across Multiple Target Sheets

A single user action can highlight marks across your entire dashboard. In the "Target Sheets" setting (Step 4), simply check all the sheets you want to respond to the click. A user could click on a customer name and see that customer’s activity highlighted on a map, a timeline, and a sales bar chart all at once.

Using a Legend to Highlight

Did you know that your color legend can be a powerful interactive tool? If your view is colored by a dimension (like Region, Category, etc.), users can click on an item in the legend to highlight all associated marks. To enable this, simply find your legend on the dashboard, click the small down arrow in its top corner, and make sure "Highlight Selected Items" is checked. It's often on by default and is an incredibly user-friendly feature.

Clearing the Highlight

So, you’ve clicked something and it's highlighted. How do you go back to the default view? Users can often get stuck here. Here are the common ways to clear a highlight:

• Click the same item again in the source sheet.
• Click any empty white space in the source sheet.
• Press the Escape key on your keyboard.

Common Troubleshooting Steps

Things don't always work on the first try. Here are a few common issues and their solutions when setting up highlights in your Tableau dashboard.

"My highlight action isn't working at all!"

This is usually caused by a mismatched field. Go back into your action's configuration (Dashboard > Actions...). Double-check two things:

• Are your Source Sheets and Target Sheets set up correctly?
• Under Target Highlighting > Selected Fields, you have to be using a dimension that exists in the underlying data for both views. If the field is named "Region" on one sheet and "Sales Region" on the other, Tableau won't know they are related.

"The dashboard is slow or laggy when I highlight."

Highlighting requires computation, and on dashboards with massive datasets or complex views, it can slow down. Here are a few things to try:

• Use a Tableau Data Extract (.hyper) instead of a live connection if possible. Extracts are much faster for this kind of work.
• Be explicit with your "Selected Fields." Using "All Fields" can force Tableau to check more connections than necessary. Naming one specific field is more efficient.
• Simplify your views. The fewer marks that need to be evaluated and rendered, the faster the action will perform.

Final Thoughts

Highlight actions are a fundamental feature that elevates a Tableau dashboard from a static image to an engaging, dynamic tool. By setting up these simple interactions, you empower your audience to explore the data, follow their curiosity, and discover compelling insights on their own without needing deep technical knowledge.

Getting these interactive elements right is a big step, but building custom reporting from scratch in traditional BI tools can still be a significant drain on time. We’ve found that many marketing and sales teams just don't have the hours to configure dashboard actions or learn a complex new tool. We built Graphed to solve this very problem. You can use plain English to describe what you want - like "compare our Facebook ad spend vs. revenue by campaign" - and get a live, interactive dashboard instantly, without ever opening an "actions" menu. It's about getting answers faster, without the steep learning curve.