Interactivity on Tableau Desktop
This week DS43 will be teaching clients during learn what the data school learns. I have been allocated the topic of Interactivity on tableau. In preparation for this task, I thought it would be best to write a blog about this exact topic.
To start with, what is interactivity on tableau desktop? Interactivity is the user’s ability to engage with a dashboard in a dynamic way. By adding interactivity, we can add more information in a small space and allow the user to answer their own questions.
Interactivity should be added when creating explorative dashboards. An explorative dashboard is one that does not answer one specific question. By adding interactivity, we are allowing users to sift through information they do not need using various actions.
The main types of actions used to add interactivity is filters, highlight, add URL, go to sheet, set actions and parameter actions. They can be found in the worksheet or dashboard tab then selecting actions.
Once you have selected actions you will see the following pane:
A filter is a tool used to select a subset of the data to draw focus to the specific section or to exclude data from our view. For example, in the dashboard below, selecting a state on the map filters the other bar charts on the visualization to show data corresponding to the selected state.
We can do this by selecting filter on our dashboard actions which then leads us to the following pop-up:
We chose which sheets we want the user to select or hover over to enable the filter and then we decide which visualizations we want to be filtered by selecting the given sheet under target sheet. We also have the option to specify if we only want the filter to affect specific fields.
A similar interactivity feature on Tableau is highlight. Unlike filtering which excludes data from our view, highlight keeps all the data in our view and highlights our selected field. This is displayed below:
We add highlighting to our dashboard by selecting the highlight pane when on our actions pop up. The highlight action pop up is alike to the filters pop up and can be navigated in a similar manner.
Another interactivity to feature on tableau is to go to a URL. Once you select the Go to URL tab, you will see the following pane:
Once we select add URL we see a pop up where we can select the sheet we want to click/ hover over to open the hyperlink. We can choose whether we want the web page to open in a new tab or window. We can then enter the hyperlink and select okay.
It is a similar process to go to sheet, except instead of adding a hyperlink you will select the sheet we want the user to be redirected to.