How to Link Dashboards in Tableau

A static Tableau dashboard gets the job done, but an interactive one tells a story. Linking your dashboards together is the difference between showing a flat report and creating a guided analytical journey for your users. This article will walk you through how to connect your Tableau dashboards, turning them into a cohesive, navigable application that’s genuinely useful and easy to explore.

Why Link Dashboards in the First Place?

Before diving into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Connecting dashboards isn't just a neat trick, it's a core feature for building powerful, user-friendly reports. It allows you to create a logical flow, guiding your audience from a high-level summary to granular details without overwhelming them with information.

Here are a few key benefits:

• Reduced Clutter: Instead of cramming dozens of worksheets onto a single, massive dashboard, you can build a clean "home" or "overview" page that links to more specific views. This makes your primary dashboard much easier to read and interpret.
• Guided Analytics: You can design a specific path for your users to follow. For instance, a marketing dashboard might start with overall campaign ROI. From there, a user could click on a specific campaign to navigate to a new dashboard showing a detailed performance breakdown for just that campaign - by ad, creative, or demographic.
• Improved User Experience (UX): Good navigation is intuitive. Just like on a website, users expect to be able to click on something to learn more. Linking dashboards creates that familiar, interactive experience inside your reports, making them far more engaging than static charts.
• Hierarchical Structure: This is perfect for creating drill-down capabilities. Start with a world map, then click a country to link to a dashboard of its states or regions, then click a region to see individual city performance. This pyramid structure is a powerful way to present complex data.

Understanding Tableau Actions: The Key to Linking

The magic behind linking dashboards in Tableau lies in a feature called Dashboard Actions. Actions are the engine of interactivity in Tableau. They define what happens when a user clicks, hovers over, or selects something in your dashboard. While there are several types of actions, we'll focus on the essential one for navigation: "Go to Sheet."

Think of an Action as a "cause-and-effect" rule you create: "When a user does X on this source sheet, Tableau will do Y to that target sheet." Our goal is to make "Y" mean "navigate me to another dashboard."

Method 1: The Essential "Go to Sheet" Action

This is the most direct and common method for linking two dashboards. We'll walk through creating a simple navigation link from a "Sales Overview" dashboard to a "Regional Details" dashboard.

Step 1: Set Up Your Dashboards

First, you need at least two dashboards built in your Tableau workbook. For our example, let's assume you have:

• D_Sales_Overview: Your main summary dashboard. It might contain KPIs for total sales, profit, and a map showing performance by state.
• D_Regional_Details: Your secondary deep-dive dashboard. It might contain a breakdown of sales by product category and a customer list for a specific region.

Step 2: Create a Navigation Trigger (Your "Button")

Next, you need something on your source dashboard for the user to click. This "trigger" can be almost anything:

• A worksheet: You could make it so clicking a bar, a country, or a bubble triggers the action.
• An image: Import a custom "Click for Details" button image for a polished look.
• A shape or text object: This is a simple and effective way to create clean-looking navigation buttons.

For this example, let's create a dedicated navigation worksheet. Create a new worksheet and call it "NAV_GoToDetails". Drag a calculated field with the text "View Regional Details" on it into the Text mark. Format it to look like a button, and then drop this small sheet onto your D_Sales_Overview dashboard where you want the button to appear. This is often more reliable than using a standard text object.

Step 3: Create the Dashboard Action

With your source dashboard (D_Sales_Overview) open, navigate to the top menu and select Dashboard > Actions.... This will open the Actions dialogue box where you'll configure your link. Click the "Add Action" button and select "Go to Sheet...".

Step 4: Configure the "Go to Sheet" Action

This is the most important step. You'll see a configuration window with several options. Here’s how to set them up for simple navigation:

• Name: Give your action a descriptive name. Something like "NAV: Go To Regional Details" helps you stay organized if you have many actions.
• Source Sheets: This is where the action originates. First, select the source dashboard (D_Sales_Overview) from the list. Then, uncheck all sheets in the box below except for your trigger worksheet (NAV_GoToDetails). This ensures the action only fires when the user clicks that specific sheet.
• Run action on: Choose how the user will trigger the action.

For a button, stick with Select.

• Target Sheet: This is the destination. Select your target dashboard, D_Regional_Details.
• Clearing the selection will: This tells Tableau what to do after the user clicks away from the button. For simple navigation, choose "Leave the sheet." This means once they've navigated away, nothing else happens.

Click "OK" to save the action, and "OK" again to close the Actions dialogue box.

Step 5: Test, Test, Test!

Your work isn't done until you've tested it. Click on your newly created "View Regional Details" button on the Sales Overview dashboard. It should instantly take you to the Regional Details dashboard. Success!

Method 2: Creating a Unified "Back" Button

Once you’ve navigated to a detail dashboard, your users need an easy way to get back. Stranding them on a detail page is a common UX mistake. The solution is creating a "Back" button using the exact same "Go to Sheet" action, just in reverse.

Let's add a back button to our D_Regional_Details dashboard:

1. On a new worksheet, create another text "button" that says "← Back to Overview."
2. Add this new worksheet to your D_Regional_Details dashboard. Place it in the corner where users would expect to find it, like the top left.
3. With the D_Regional_Details dashboard active, go to Dashboard > Actions... again.
4. Add a new Go to Sheet... action.
5. Configure it as follows:

Click OK, and now you have a complete, two-way navigation loop. Users can go from summary to detail and back again seamlessly.

Pro-Tip: Passing Filters for a Dynamic Experience

Simple navigation is good, but context-aware navigation is great. What if clicking on the "West" region on your overview map not only took you to the details page but also automatically filtered that page to only show data for the West region? This is called "passing a filter," and it's what makes Tableau dashboards feel like a true application.

You can do this using the same "Go to Sheet" action. Instead of creating a separate navigation button, we'll make the map itself the trigger.

Follow these steps:

1. Navigate to your D_Sales_Overview dashboard.
2. Go to Dashboard > Actions... and open a new "Go to Sheet" action.
3. Configure the Action menu slightly differently this time:

Now, test it out. Go to your overview map and click on a region. You'll be whisked away to the details dashboard, and all the charts there will now only show data relevant to the region you clicked. This immediate, contextual drill-down is a massive superpower for dashboard design.

Common Pitfalls and Troubleshooting

• My Button Doesn't Work: Double-check your "Source Sheets" configuration. The number one mistake is having the wrong dashboard or worksheet selected as the source for the action.
• Everything Disappears on the Target Page: This often happens when you're passing a filter from a source that doesn't have a matching value on the target. Make sure the filtering fields exist and make sense on both sides.
• Accidental Navigation: If your clicks are taking you to other dashboards unexpectedly, check if you've accidentally set a whole worksheet as a navigation source instead of a specific button.

Final Thoughts

Mastering dashboard actions in Tableau is a fundamental step toward building analytics tools, not just reports. By linking your dashboards, you create a guided and intuitive experience that empowers users to explore data on their own terms, drilling from a bird's-eye view into the details that matter most.

While this process is powerful, it does require clicking through menus and understanding the specific logic of the tool. At Graphed , we aim to eliminate this friction entirely. Instead of configuring actions manually, you can simply tell our AI analyst what you need in plain English, like "Create a dashboard showing overall sales, then let me click on a region to see a detailed product breakdown." We handle connecting the data and building the interactive experience in seconds, turning hours of configuration into a simple conversation and getting you straight to the insights.