Ever needed to add a hyperlink to a dashboard? Now you can!

For today’s dashboard week tip – I’ll let you know how to add a hyperlink to a dashboard.

Here’s my viz for today – I went with a long form dashboard, think of it as a poster. At the bottom I wanted to add a link to more information in an article I’d read which inspired the viz.

How to add the hyperlink

1. Create a calculated field called link – give it a value of zero . You can actually make this whatever you like, but keep it zero for simplicity here.
2. On a new sheet, switch the mark type to shape.
3. Drag the new link field you just made to label.
4.  Click on label and enter in the section of text you want to display – highlight one part of text you want to appear as a link (eg. click here) as blue and underlined. The hex code for the classic blue link is #0000EE. Note here that the whole section of text is going to be a link. However by making one word appear as a link then the section will appear to the user as a ‘proper’ hyperlink.
5. Change the shape to a transparent .png (Google and add one to shapes in your repository if you don’t have already – really useful thing to have)
6. If you can’t find a transparent .png (or aren’t able to download one yet) then go to colour and drag opacity to zero – this will have the same effect. Make the size small as possible as well if you are using this method.
7. Now turn off the tooltip – If you’re not sure how to do this, open up the tooltip box and uncheck the ‘show tooltip’ option. Look at the image below:                                                                                                               
8. Now comes for the fun part! Click on worksheet on the top toolbar and go to ‘actions’              
9. Now click ‘Add Action’ and select ‘URL’ from the list of options.
10. Follow the setup in the config box shown here.

• Select only the worksheet you are using for this link
• Run action on SELECT
• Add the URL you want to link to into the input box

11. Now drag that sheet to the desired place on your dashboard – Done.

Well done – you’ve just added a hyperlink to your dashboard – hope this helps!

Keep on follow me and the rest of the team during the week – any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me via twitter or linkedin.