Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard 101: A Comprehensive Analysis

Users can quickly create reports and dashboards using Tableau’s extensive set of tools and widgets by dragging and dropping the appropriate rows and columns from the dataset. As a result, each Tableau report can be combined or integrated to create a dashboard, which can be further customized to compare and analyze contents in the same worksheet at the same time. However, because Tableau dashboards contain a wide range of data from individual reports, users frequently struggle to gain relevant insights from them. To eliminate such complications, users can follow the process of Tableau adding filters to dashboard to segregate information, thereby gaining different perspectives. 

This blog talks about sinking the data source, creating dashboards, and the process of Tableau adding filters to dashboard.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• What is Tableau?
  • Key Features of Tableau
• Tableau Adding Filter To Dashboard Process
  • Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Loading Data into Tableau Workspace
  • Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Creating data visualizations
  • Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboards
• Conclusion

Prerequisites

• Fundamental knowledge of data visualization.

What is Tableau?

Tableau is a visual analytics platform that was created by Pat Hanrahan, Christian Chabot, and Chris Stolte in 2003. It allows you to analyze datasets and create interactive reports, charts, and dashboards. To put it another way, Tableau is one of the most popular analytics solutions for modern Business Intelligence, making it easier for data analysts to explore data, manage information, and share insights. Such features empower organizations to make data-driven decisions. 

Tableau is also extremely versatile; you can connect it to external data sources to retrieve data and perform data visualization operations. Tableau can pull data from any platform or extract data from any database, including Excel, PDF, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services. Tableau also has a large number of Tableau filter sets, such as context, dimension, and measures filters, that you can use to filter or segregate data in the dashboard by customizing it with a specific set of values and context. With Tableau adding a filter to the dashboard data is easily readable and segregated.

According to a report, over 64,200 companies are using Tableau for analyzing and visualizing datasets to make data-driven decisions. With Tableau, users can effectively create interactive dashboards, charts, graphs, and visualizations. With dashboards, users can perform various operations like Tableau adding filter to dashboards.

Key Features of Tableau

Some of the key features of Tableau are as follows:

• Advanced Dashboard: Tableau Dashboards provide an in-depth view of the data using advanced visualizations. Dashboards are considered to be very informative as they support the addition of multiple views and objects. Tableau also allows visualization of data in the form of Stories by giving users a variety of layouts and formats to choose from.
• In-Memory and Live Data: Tableau ensures seamless connectivity with data extracted from numerous external data sources in the form of In-memory or live data sources. This gives users the ability to analyze data from various data sources without any restrictions. 
• Attractive Visualizations: Tableau gives users the ability to create different types of data visualizations. For example, users can seamlessly create the simplest visualizations such as a Pie Chart or Bar Chart or some of the most complex visualizations such as Bullet charts, Gantt charts, Boxplot, etc. Tableau also comes with information on geographical data such as Countries, Cities, Postal Codes, etc. that allows users to build visualizations using informative maps.
• Robust Security: Tableau implements special measures to ensure user and data security. It houses a security system based on permission and authentication mechanisms for user access and data connections.
• Predictive Analytics: Tableau houses several data modeling capabilities, including forecasting and trending. Users can easily add a trend line or forecast data for any chart, and view details describing the fit easily.

Tableau Adding Filter To Dashboard Process

Here are a few steps involved in adding a filter to a Tableau Dashboard of your choice:

• Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Loading Data into Tableau Workspace
• Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Creating Data Visualizations
• Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Adding Filter to Dashboards

Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Loading Data into Tableau Workspace

• Step 1: For Tableau adding filter to dashboard, you must create and configure a new dashboard. Initially, you have to connect a data source and build a dashboard using datasets. 
• Step 2: In this tutorial, you will be using the “Distribution Unit Volume” data for performing data visualization. Initially, you will be creating separate worksheets or reports and then combining them to build a dashboard. Later Tableau adding filter to dashboards happens.
• Step 3: Now, you have to connect the data source with Tableau for loading the data.

• Step 4: In the Tableau workspace, click on the “Data” menu and select the “New Data Source” option. Then select “Connect to data” from the drop-down menu.

• Step 5: The “Connect” dialog box will pop up where you have to select the preferred data source. In your case, since the data source is in excel format, click on the “Microsoft Excel” option from the left side panel. Then, you are prompted to load the data from your local machine. 

• Step 6: Now, “Distribution Unit Volume” data is loaded into the Tableau workspace, as shown in the above image. The data includes information on volume distribution across different distribution units in various regions. In the Tableau Workspace, the columns or fields of the dataset are categorized into two segments called Dimensions and Measures. In other words, dimensions are the qualitative values segmented based on a particular group, and measures are the quantitative or numeric values. 
• Step 7: In the “Distribution Unit Volume” dataset, the fields such as City, Distribution Unit, DU Code, Mode, Region are referred to as Dimensions, while Distribution Volume, Latitude, and Longitude are called Measures. In the left side pane, after the data has been loaded, you can see dimensions and measures in separate sections.

 Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Creating Data Visualizations

• Step 1: At this stage, we are all set to perform data visualization using the newly loaded data. Now, on the “Marks” card, choose the pie chart from the dropdown menu.

• Step 2: Then, drag the Mode column from the “Dimensions” segment on the left side to the “Columns” section on the right side. Similarly, drag “Region” from the “Dimensions” segment and “Distribution Volume” from the “Measures” segment over the Color and Angle options in the Marks card, respectively. 

• Step 3: Now, you can see two separate pie charts on the right side, which illustrate the distribution volume contribution based on each region.

• Step 4: In the next step, you will further configure and customize the pie chart based on your preferences. You can change the pie charts’ size by adjusting the “Size” option present on the Marks card. Likewise, you can also adjust the color and label of the pie chart by using the Color and Label option, respectively. Then, name the sheet as “Regional Distribution Volume By Mode.”
• Step 5: The pie chart now only distinguishes mode data by region based on color and color distribution within the chart, which is difficult to interpret without numbers. To visualize the mode in terms of percentage, you can click on the dropdown menu on the Marks card. Then choose “Percent of Total” from the “Quick Table Calculation” menu.
• Step 6: Create a new sheet to visualize “Distribution Unit” and “Distribution Volume” concerning the specific region.

• Step 7: For creating a new chart, drag “Distribution Volume” from Dimensions and drop it into the “Columns” section. Then, drag “Distribution Unit” from Dimensions and drop it into the “Rows” section, as shown in the above image.
• Step 8: The region parameter in the chart is presented over the same color by default, making it difficult to interpret. For differentiating each region in the chart with different colors, you have to drag the “Region” dimension and drop over Colors in the Marks card. 
• Step 9: Now, you get a horizontal bar chart for Distribution Volume, Distribution Unit, and Region. Then, rename Sheet 1 as “DU Volume Contribution.” 

• Step 10: In the next step, combine the previously created visualizations into a single dashboard. For creating a new dashboard, click on the Dashboard tab in the top menu. Then, select the “New Dashboard” option. You can also select the new dashboard symbol present in the sheet bar to create a new dashboard.

• Step 11: Now, you are ready to incorporate the Sheets into the dashboard. In the left side pane, you can see the previously created Sheets, such as “Regional Distribution Volume By Mode” and “DU Volume Contribution.” For creating a dashboard with those two sheets, drag the sheets from the left side and drop them into the “Drop sheets here” section on the right side.

• Step 12: You can see that the dashboard is successfully created with two sheets, as shown in the above image.

Tableau Adding Filter to Dashboard: Adding Filter to Dashboards

• Step 1: After creating a dashboard, you are now all set for Tableau adding filter to dashboard. When you click on any of the two visualizations on the dashboard, you can see a symbolic list of options on the left side of the sheet, as shown in the above image.

• Step 2: Now, you can see two separate pie charts on the right side, which illustrate the distribution volume contribution based on each region.

• Step 3: For example, when we select the North region in the first sheet, the second sheet only displays the information concerning the North region, as shown in the above image. 

• Step 4: When you select the West region in the “Regional Distribution Volume By Mode” sheet, the “DU Volume Contribution” sheet only displays information that is related to the West region. Once you activate the filter option in the dashboard, anyone with whom you have shared the Tableau dashboard can use it to filter and view specific data based on their preferences. That way Tableau adding filter to dashboard is visible to others with whom dashboard is shared.

• Step 5: To filter data from the dashboard, you should configure the filter to appear over the dashboard, making it easy for users to interpret preferred information. Click on the “More Options,” select filter from the displayed menu, and select Mode. Now, you created an appropriate filter for the Mode dimension, as shown in the above image. 
• Step 6: After configuring the filter options, the Mode filter appears on the right side of the dashboard. When you check the appropriate filter box, the dashboard displays you with the appropriate information.

• Step 7: In this case, the filters are displayed in the form of checkboxes. You can, however, change the view format by customizing the filters. To display mode filters as a dropdown menu, right-click on the filter and select “Multiple Values [dropdown].” When you choose L2 from the dropdown menu, you can only see data about the L2 model.

• Step 8: When you choose L2 from the Mode filter menu, the data is filtered in the “Regional Distribution Volume By Mode” sheet but not in the “DU Volume Contribution” analysis. Consequently, you must configure the dashboard to apply filters to all the sheets. 

• Step 9: For applying filters to all the sheets present in the dashboard, right-click on the specific filter and click on the “Apply to Worksheets” option. Then, click on the “Selected Worksheets” option. The dialogue box “Apply Filter to Worksheets [Mode]” appears now. Select “DU Volume Contribution” from the drop-down menu in the dialog box. As a result, the filter gets applied to all the sheets in the dashboard.

• Step 10: To check whether the filter got applied across all the sheets in the dashboard, select M1 from the Mode filter. As a result, you can see that the analysis on the left side shows the contribution of different regions in distribution volume according to mode M1. Similarly, the filter has also impacted the “DU Volume Contribution” sheet, which confirms that the filter is successfully applied across all sheets in the dashboard.

On following the above-given steps, you completed the process of Tableau adding filter to dashboard.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned about Tableau, sinking the data source, creating dashboards, and Tableau adding filter to dashboards. This article mainly focuses on adding filters to dimensions and measures to filter contents based on rows and columns of the dataset. However, you can also explore different types of filters like extract filters, context filters, and table calc filters to add to your dashboards, making them look more effective. 

As you collect and manage your data across several applications and databases in your business, it is important to consolidate it for a complete performance analysis of your business. To achieve this you need to assign a portion of your engineering bandwidth to Integrate data from all sources, Clean & Transform it, and finally, Load it to a Cloud Data Warehouse, BI Tool like Tableau, or a destination of your choice for further Business Analytics.

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