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05 · Building Dashboards Basics

A dashboard combines multiple worksheets into one interactive view, with actions letting one chart filter or highlight another. This module builds a two-sheet dashboard from the Region-by-Sales bar chart (Module 3) and the Sales-over-time line chart (Module 4), then wires a filter action between them.

1. Creating a dashboard

  1. Click the New Dashboard icon at the bottom of the window (next to the worksheet tabs), or Dashboard > New Dashboard. This opens a blank canvas with a Size control (top-left of the Dashboard pane) — leave it at the default Desktop Browser size for this exercise.
  2. The left Dashboard pane lists every worksheet in the workbook — from Modules 3 and 4, this includes your Region bar chart and your Sales-over-time line chart (rename each sheet tab descriptively first, e.g. double-click Sheet 1 → "Sales by Region", so the dashboard pane is readable).
  3. Drag "Sales by Region" from the pane onto the left half of the dashboard canvas. Drag "Sales Over Time" onto the right half. Tableau's Tiled layout (the default) auto-arranges them side by side with a divider you can drag to resize.

2. Titles, text, and legends

  1. Drag a Text object (from the Objects section at the bottom of the Dashboard pane) above the two charts, double-click it, and type a dashboard title like "Northwind Retail — Sales Overview".
  2. If a legend (e.g. for Category color, if you kept that from Module 3) appears cluttered or floating oddly, drag its edge to reposition it, or right-click it on the dashboard → Remove from Dashboard if it's redundant with a chart's own labels.
  3. Toggle between Tiled and Floating per-object via right-click on an object's grey border → Floating — floating objects can overlap and be positioned freely (useful for a title banner or a logo), while tiled objects respect the grid and resize predictably as the dashboard resizes.

3. Filter actions — making one chart filter another

  1. Go to Dashboard > Actions... > Add Action > Filter.
  2. Set Source Sheets to "Sales by Region" and Target Sheets to "Sales Over Time". Set Run action on to Select (the default), and leave Target Filters as All Fields (Tableau will filter the target on the dimensions shared between the two sheets — here, Region).
  3. Click OK, then test it: on the dashboard, click the East bar in "Sales by Region". The line chart should update to show only East's monthly Sales trend — the pattern behind almost every "click a bar, watch other charts update" dashboard you've ever used.
  4. Click the East bar again (or an empty area of the chart) to deselect and return the line chart to showing all regions — filter actions based on Select toggle off when you click the same mark again.

4. Highlight actions — a softer alternative

  1. Add a second action: Dashboard > Actions... > Add Action > Highlight. Same Source/Target sheet setup as the filter action.
  2. Unlike a filter action, a highlight action doesn't remove data from the target view — it dims everything except the matching marks, keeping context (you can still see all regions' magnitude in the target) while drawing attention to the selected one.
  3. Choose Filter vs. Highlight based on intent: use Filter when the target view would be genuinely more useful showing only the selection (e.g. drilling from a Region bar into that region's own trend), and Highlight when preserving the full picture while calling out the selection matters more (e.g. showing where one region ranks among all of them over time).

5. Dashboard-level filters (Show as Filter)

  1. Right-click the Region field's legend or a sheet's Region filter card and choose Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source to make one filter control every sheet in the workbook that shares the Orders connection, rather than wiring per-sheet actions for a case this simple.
  2. This is the fastest way to add a single global filter dropdown; actions (Section 3–4) are for the richer "clicking a mark drives another chart" interactivity that a simple filter control can't express.

How It Actually Works

A dashboard doesn't merge its sheets into one query — each tile keeps issuing its own independent VizQL query, and an action works by capturing a click/hover event and injecting an implicit filter clause into the other sheets' next query run:

  1. A filter action from "Sales by Region" to "Sales Over Time" means: when you click the East bar, Tableau appends WHERE Region = 'East' to the query that "Sales Over Time" would otherwise run, then re-executes it. That's why the line chart's re-drawn totals must equal a hand-filter of Orders to East rows only (1001, 1003, 1006) — it's the same underlying GROUP BY Month query, just with an added WHERE clause supplied by the action, not a different chart.
  2. Highlight actions are cheaper than filter actions mechanically: they don't add a WHERE clause or re-run the query at all — they only change which already-rendered marks get dimmed vs. full-opacity client-side, which is why hovering to highlight is instantaneous even against a live, slow data source, while a filter action re-triggers a real query round trip.
  3. "Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source" (Section 5) is different from both: it doesn't operate as a click-triggered action at all, but as a shared filter clause baked into every sheet's query from the same connection, evaluated before the sheet even renders — which is why it needs no "clicking a mark" step and instead behaves like a dashboard-wide global WHERE a viewer's dropdown directly controls.

Cheat sheet

Task Where
Create a dashboard Bottom tab bar → New Dashboard icon
Add a sheet to the dashboard Drag from Dashboard pane onto canvas
Add a title/text Objects section → Text, drag onto canvas
Tiled vs Floating object Right-click object border
Configure filter/highlight actions Dashboard menu → Actions...
Global filter across all sheets Right-click filter card → Apply to Worksheets

Exercise

Build the two-sheet dashboard described above with a working filter action from "Sales by Region" to "Sales Over Time". Then add a third worksheet (a simple table: Category on Rows, SUM(Profit) on Text) to the dashboard, and extend the same filter action so clicking a region bar also filters the Category/Profit table.