When Might You Use a Dashboard Action in Tableau?

A static dashboard can show you what happened, but an interactive one tells a story your audience can explore for themselves. In Tableau, the secret to transforming a flat report into an engaging analytical tool is Dashboard Actions. This guide will walk you through the different types of Tableau Dashboard Actions and show you exactly when and how to use them to make your data come to life.

First, What Are Tableau Dashboard Actions?

In simple terms, Dashboard Actions create interactivity within your dashboards. They are user-driven events that let you, your team, or your clients engage with a visualization to reveal deeper insights. When a user selects, hovers over, or performs any other interaction with the dashboard, something will happen, transforming charts from static displays into engaging tools.

Instead of just presenting charts separately, actions connect them. A click in one chart can automatically filter, highlight, or jump to relevant information in another, creating a guided analytical experience. Mastering these can elevate your work from a simple report to a dynamic application.

The Filter Action: A Guiding Hand for Your Data

The Filter Action is perhaps the most fundamental and widely used action. It allows a selection in one worksheet (the source) to filter the data displayed in other worksheets (the target).

When a Dashboard Filter Might Be Handy

• Creating a Summary-to-Detail Flow: This is a classic use case. You have a dashboard with a high-level overview chart - like monthly sales by region - and another chart showing a granular breakdown, like sales by product for the selected region. A user can click on the "West" region in the summary, and the detail view instantly filters to show only products sold in the West. This keeps the dashboard clean and prevents information overload.
• Master/Detail Dashboards: Imagine a list of all your customers in one sheet. When you click a customer's name, you want to see their specific purchase history, support tickets, and contact information update in adjacent sheets on the same dashboard. A Filter Action makes this seamless.
• Guiding a Narrative: You can create a dashboard that walks users through a specific analysis path. Clicking on "Top Performing Campaigns" could filter subsequent charts to display associated ad spend, conversion rates, and ROI, making the story clear and easy to follow.

How to Set It Up

1. Navigate to your dashboard and select Dashboard > Actions... from the top menu.
2. In the Actions dialog box, click Add Action > Filter...
3. Give your action a descriptive name, like "Filter to Product Details."
4. Under Source Sheets, select the master sheet that a person will use to make a selection for the data they wish to filter and visualize on the next sheets.
5. Under Target Sheets, select the detail sheets to which the changes will be applied.
6. For Run action on, choose the interaction method: Select requires a click, while Hover works by hovering over with the mouse. Menu will add a drop-down menu for users to select an option to filter the rest of the dashboard. Select is typically the standard option, the most common.
7. Choose what happens when the selection is cleared: Either maintain the filter, show all values, or have some of the worksheets or charts only display when a user makes a selection.

Hit OK, and you're all set. Clicking a section in your source sheet should now filter your target sheets automatically!

The Highlight Action: Drawing Attention Without Losing Your Focus

The Highlight Action works similarly to a filter, with a crucial difference. It doesn't remove unselected data, rather, it highlights specified values, allowing you to see relationships across various charts. This subtlety is great for spotting relationships that might otherwise be hard to notice.

When Should I Choose This Action

• Correlating Data in Different Visualizations: You have a map showing sales by city and a bar chart showing sales by product category. Hovering over Seattle in the chart allows you to see related product category information on adjacent sheets, highlighting which ones perform best and by how much compared to other products in other cities.
• Seeing Connections in Time Series Data: A line chart showing monthly revenue and another chart visualizing traffic sources in a specific month. By using this action, you can hover over, say, your November revenues and immediately see the correspondence on your traffic sources to spot any pattern or relations you might want to optimize.

How to Configure It

To get this action up and running, follow these steps:

1. Open the dashboard, select Dashboard > Actions... and click Add Action > Highlight...
2. Give it a descriptive name that can be understood at a glance, like "Hover to Performance".
3. Select your source and target sheets, and choose a trigger event - such as hovering.

You'll see how effectively you can draw connections between charts, enhancing user comprehension of the dashboard as a whole. This simple action can make a big difference by integrating your visuals.

The URL Action: Linking Dashboards Beyond

The URL action allows you to dynamically create external links connected to web-based content from your viz. This simple action can enrich your dashboards, making them feel more connected with other data sources or tools.

What Should Be the Main Goal of My URL Action

• Adding an External Info Source: Imagine you have a viz showing major competitors. By including the URL action, you can set a link that opens their website when the user clicks a name in the visualization.
• Linking to Your CRM: If you have a dashboard showing sales performances, you can click on a salesperson's name or picture and go straight to their profile in Salesforce or your company's CRM. This saves time by eliminating the need to search for information across platforms since you can now do it directly from your dashboard.
• Search Integration: Clicking "New York City" in your chart can automatically start a Google search for "best pizza in New York". To achieve this, build URL actions in which you set the parameters to be part of the search query.

How to Set It Up

1. In the Actions... menu, choose Add Action > URL...
2. Give your action a descriptive name in the "URL" box, starting with the address link you'd like to apply the action to. Use Insert fields or parameters by clicking on the arrow next to the URL Field. This gives the action dynamic properties.

This action creates a hyperlink on your dashboard that links to a Google search and includes the "City Name" from the sheet you have chosen.

The Go to Sheet Action: Building a User-friendly Navigation Experience

This action is straightforward and excellent for dashboard navigation. Use it to jump from one dashboard or worksheet to another with a single click.

When a Go to Sheet Action is Recommended

• Creating a Landing Page or Index: Build a "Home" dashboard that acts as a central hub. It might feature high-level KPIs and navigation buttons (created from separate worksheets with shapes or text) that use Go to Sheet actions to link to different, more detailed dashboards like "Marketing Performance" or "Sales Pipeline."
• Drilling Through to an Appendix: If you have a complex dashboard, you might want to link to a separate sheet that contains definitions, methodology notes, or raw data tables. Clicking a simple "View Data Details" button could take users there instantly.

How to Set It Up

Setting this one up is identical to the other action setups. Just select Dashboard > Actions > Add Action > Go to Sheet.... Then specify the source sheet (your navigation button) and the target dashboard or worksheet you're linking to. This process transforms your work into a more interactive application than a static dashboard.

The Set Action: Creating Highly Interactive Experiences

The Set Action is advanced but highly rewarding, it will elevate your Tableau skills to the next level. A Set Action allows you and your audience to dynamically change the value in a set by selecting marks in your viz. This means you have to create a set before you make an action, which makes your visuals more engaging than ever.

When to Use It

• Ad Hoc Segmentations: In a scatter plot of customers by revenue and profitability, users can drag to select a group of high-value customers and with a Set Action, they can add these values to a temporary set. You can then use the created set to highlight those customers across your dashboard, calculate the percentage of the total, etc.
• Asymmetric Drill-down: A Set Action can create a "drill-down" experience in which you click a plus sign (+) next to a product category to examine its subcategories. Unlike the standard hierarchy, this action follows with the rest of the values, making it more intuitive to explore the data.

How to Implement It

1. Create the set first. You can do this by right-clicking on your dimensions in the pane and choosing "Create Set...".
2. Go to the Actions dialog box and select Add Action > Change Set Values...
3. Specify the source that holds your input view and the target set that you made.
4. Select what happens when the set action is cleared (either add all values to the set or none).

With this action in place, a click in your viz will not just filter or highlight, it will actually change the underlying set, which allows for more advanced and creative visualizations and analytics.

Final Thoughts

In summary, Tableau dashboard actions transform data from static displays into dynamic, interactive tools. They enable users to fluidly navigate, compare data points, seamlessly link to external sources, and build app-like experiences. Whether you’re using a simple Filter Action or a dynamic Set Action, these are game-changers for enabling people to interact with and understand the data.

Creating interactive dashboards in Tableau is a skill that elevates your analyses from static displays to engaging data explorations. Actions turn passive viewing into an active conversation with your data, enabling users to filter, highlight, and navigate with just a click. Whether you’re guiding stakeholders through key performance indicators with a Filter Action or enabling deep comparative analysis with a Set Action, these tools unlock insights that flat charts could never reveal.

Mastering tools like Tableau takes time and expertise. For tools as complex as these, creating professional yet user-friendly dashboards can feel overwhelming due to a steep learning curve. This is why we have created Graphed. With our tool, instead of learning how each chart works or deciding between a set or sheet action, you can simply connect your data and tell your AI data analyst what you want displayed as a dashboard. Forget wondering which action works best for a specific visualization, with our tool, you can just ask in simple English: 'Show a dashboard for Sales Revenue vs Ad Spend' and have it done in seconds. Have all your data from various sources integrated and at the reach of one AI Analyst and save precious time on your analytics now.