How to use Tableau Actions on your Dashboard

hey guys welcome to another video i have a request from gabon sibas who wrote some video related to set actions would be a good idea because i don't understand how it works well actions are super powerful in tableau so i'm to do an entire video on all the things you can do with action so before we get into that i do want to show you guys that i have updated my channel artwork i've modified a lot of the thumbnails i'm learning so much about youtube so if you guys like the new artwork reply in the comments with something like jelly babies right something fun and also i have filmed and recorded and scheduled heaps of videos you can see they're all on their way and we have videos all the way up until the end of december so be sure to hit that subscribe button and set up the notification bell to all so that when the videos come out you can see them straight away all right let's get into the video all right we're now in tableau and we're looking at the superstore data and let's do an example of actions right so i'm going to show it to you in action see what i said there um let's do category and sale so something really basic um if you've seen a lot of my videos before you'll see that i do this quite often and let's add that in here so i'm not gonna explain too much about this kind of building bar charts and everything because this is kind of like straightforward now let's hide that i'm going to do another one subcategory this time let's do sales all right and i'm going to color it by category all right let's bring the let's call this sub category category category let's call this category all right let's bring this into a dashboard clean this up a little bit all right reduce the height make that like this let's go entire view and maybe highest lowest all right let's get rid of this add a little bit of white space in between all right we're now ready to use actions all right what happens if i click technology well nothing nothing happens what would be nice to see is to be like well what is technology made of like what is this 1.3 million dollars actually made of so when i click on it it'd be nice that it filters for just the red ones right or if i click the orange ones it filters just the orange ones right so the way i can do that is when you've activated a sheet inside the dashboard and actions only work in a dashboard right they don't work in a sheet because the idea of actions is it's one sheet affecting another or filtering another sheet so you can't do that in just the individual sheet mode so it has to be in the dashboard so if you ever confuse the you know where's my dashboard uh where's my action button just make sure you're in a dashboard right so we go ahead and just press this and watch what happens now if i click this red one right it filters it right this is extremely powerful because you can use this in so many different ways and it's kind of a standard when it comes to dashboards that any bi tool has to be able to do this it's just expected right now if i go the other way let's say i click this well nothing really happens but it'd be cool if it can go the other way as well so you can probably guess that all you have to do is click that button right there so if i go well show me these top five what is the breakdown by category so i can go like this little box or i can click some one individually or i can do this one hold ctrl click another one and click another one and this one will keep filtering based on what i've selected and the cool thing is this applies to anything you add to this dashboard so let's say let's say we do another sheet and let's call this uh let's do something a little bit more complicated let's go uh let's go product line let's go uh quantity and i want to do this in a tree map right something like that okay and let's add the color as the profitability all right so we can see kind of a red green kind of all the ones that aren't very profitable all right so let's do this as product name and let's bring that into the dashboard like so all right i'm going to go full screen get rid of this all right and maybe we'll put it vertically or maybe we'll do it this way yeah that's a lot better right i just want to make this one on the right really big so i've got this one activated as a filter and i've got this one activated as a filter so i can actually do filtering um in stages so let's say i go well show me anything in furniture right you can see this one's already filtered as well right so now it's showing me bookcases and then let's say the question to a manager or a team or a strategy or something like that you're going well why is furnishings not making that much money what kind of products do we have in there so if you click this one it'll filter even further so what are we looking here on the right we're looking at the entire product line data set filtered for furniture and then within that furnishings right so these are all furnishings if i went the other way i can do it as well so let's say i deactivate this so to go back to original you just click the one you clicked originally and it goes back so let's say i mean these are all my high selling products on the left because the tree map goes this way from highest to lowest right so let's say i go well just show me this group oops hang on i press right click no no no no all right let's say just show me this group right here i can actually just go like this and it will show me a breakdown of category and subcategory sales oh hang on we're going to activate this first i've got that step all right so i can go something like this right and you can see this is filtered and i can go well only show me machines right and you can see you can go back and forth back and forth and this is basically what's called data deep dive or data exploration and when you publish this to the cloud right which i have heaps of videos coming for that if you uh once you get to the tablet online stage once you publish it to the cloud anyone who's looking at it can do all that filtering so you can have in my experience what i've seen like several different analysts from maybe two or three different areas or divisions using the same dashboard but for different purposes right back then when we only had like excel or microsoft access or maybe not accessed by excel at least you would have to build something different for each person or a different analysis whereas with tableau and bi tools it's self-service you can give the tool to someone to solve their own problems or find out information of what they want to do so that is the most basic form of actions what we're going to do next is start going deeper into kind of the customization you can do in the other types of actions besides filtering as well in the data sets all right so let's get into that one i'm going to clear out the tableau desktop i'm going to start a fresh one okay going back to the two originals we had which were category and subcategory we're going to rebuild the dashboard all right let's go like this so nice and clean nice and fresh fresh okay too wide here we go all right so i said that the easiest way to build them is using this button all right every time you press this button it like we said creates an action but where are those actions actually stored so where you want to go is again make sure you're in dashboard right and you want to click on dashboard and then there's an option there's an actions button right here so you click on that and you'll see there's actually two actions that exist well where did they come from when we click this funnel button it generates automatically a action right so we can go in and edit it let's get rid of this second one for the moment just to keep it simple so this is the one that we built here which filters this one and any other subsequent uh sheets that we're going to add into it so if we double click we can go inside and this is how it is set up so the source sheets is the first part this is basically what which sheet am i interacting with right meaning which what am i clicking on so in this case it's category right and then um when we click on this right we're set on select and i'll explain what the other two do what what are our target sheets which ones are going to get filtered well that's what we look at in this one so when we click on category it's going to filter category and subcategory right so what happens if i have let's say a let's say a third one okay so i'm going to cancel this and i'm going to build a third one but maybe the behavior i want is i don't want it to get filtered all right so let's say i've got ship status here and i'm just going to put a value something like that so really basic let's bring this in alright so shift value so right now what happens is this filter by default just applies to everything so if i click on that you can see how it's it's changing well i don't want this to change so i can go into that that action settings right let's get rid of this sub one i forgot to press ok all right and we can just tick off the ship because we don't want it to apply to that particular target sheet and then we just go okay so now when i click on it notice that this bottom one doesn't change and you're probably going to say well like don't you always wanted to filter well no because sometimes you have it that this stays fixed maybe it's a reference table that you want everything else to kind of revolve around it right i've used that many times where you really just want it to not be part of it so that's one way for it to be ignored there's another way to do it so let's say i go into dashboard actions again and let's get rid of this alright so we just remove it so nothing's nothing's going to happen now great no problem and we'll reactivate it again the other way to just have this get ignored is if you click on this little triangle here you can just go ignore actions right and that will do the same thing right okay so another little tip so that is basically how you would start building the actions now you can do some more behavioral stuff which i will show you let's go back into dashboard actions we're going to edit the one we built right and we're going to start modifying this part first this is by default set to select meaning when you click it that's when the action activates if you select hover you don't actually have to click you just hover the mouse so let's go okay okay i'll show you how that works so when i hover over furniture you can see it's filtering automatically right or the orange one or the red one again depends what kind of behavior you want um i would recommend though like to test this first um from a performance point of view i'm using the superstore data but sometimes depends on your skill level you could be using really really large data sets we're talking you know in the hundreds of millions maybe more and the rendering time of this could be quite long could be very slow so you always have to think about the user experience that they're not going to get annoyed because things are just taking too long right you want it to be a good user experience so you'd rather not have that feature at all if it means giving a bad experience so that's what that one does let's go back into actions and let's say change this to menu so what happens after that let's go okay and okay so when i click on it it takes me to a menu right you can see this comes up instead of having to just hover over something when i click on this and hover i get the same thing right or you can set it to menu now this is very beneficial because a lot of the times when people are new to tableau i found that when they they're trying to get that menu to come up that one and it's actually a lot shorter now it used to be like two seconds before it would come up now it's almost instant right if not instant already and a lot of people who aren't used to it they're like clicking and double clicking and right clicking and doing all sorts of crazy stuff because people are impatient so what you can do is just set it to automatically be a menu and if you wanted to generate the filter to execute the filter itself you can just press this automatically generated link right and that's how you use the menu one all right next let's go back in here i'm gonna switch this back to select and now we're going to look at this part right here and what this does is it controls what happens to the ones that get filtered right is it going to show everything is it going to take them out automatically or is it going to leave them out or include them back in so it's hard to explain so i'll show you what happens if we go leave the filter all right and i click furniture right everything's still normal the setting we just changed is for when you release it so if i click this again right nothing happens right and then if i click on orange it'll filter and when i click it again nothing happens so that's the type of behavior you'll get sometimes it's good depends what you're trying to achieve right but knowing it's there is great because if you need it it's there let's go to the last one and exclude and you can probably guess this is kind of the opposite in a way so if i click on this normal right and now there's nothing because it's excluding anything else so it'll only appear when there's data now this one is really good for something that is for data sets that are extraordinarily large so let's say in each of these there are i don't know 500 million um data points or something or something that's graphics heavy back in the day it was like maps maps used to take some time to render but with the new google well with the new map box feature it's not so much an issue now but anything where it takes up a lot of processing or calculations or something at the beginning it's usually showing all your data so instead you can use this setting so when you click on something it's like a filtered version of whatever the visualization is so there's less for your computer or the internet to process right so it's a performance consideration all right so that is basically um the customization you can do with filtering there's a few other ones but they're a bit more advanced tools probably not useful to a lot of beginner intermediate even most experts i particularly don't use a lot of the more advanced features but if you're interested to know what those are leave a comment saying you know show me the expert or something like that and i'll know to make some more videos on it all right so we're going to cover like i think there's three or four more action types and we're going to cover them i'm going to clear this out and we're going to start with a fresh sheet all right we're back to the original dashboard i'm going to show you the next one which is called uh highlighters highlight highlight or something like that actions all right we're going to go add action and highlight this works a little bit like the filter except um it doesn't actually get rid of values but it will highlight them so you can kind of see them in context so let's do it kind of the opposite so we're going to use cat subcategory to highlight category right so going the other way so our source sheet will be subcategory that's where we're clicking right we're doing select because we want to click on it and we want it to apply to um let's do it to both and we'll leave it as such we'll go okay and okay so now when i click on copiers you can see that these two values are still here right and it's only highlighting the value and this is really beneficial for when you want to see values in context of everything else that's in the data set because 1.3 million on its own may not mean anything but compared to other groups it may mean it's good it's bad it's high it's low whatever it might be and that's really all there is to highlight it's very very simple right we'll do one modification to it so you can kind of see the changes if i do um let's say let's go the other way let's see how it works and we'll turn that one off all right you can see it's showing just on its own right so there's not really much to highlighting so we'll move to the next one which is url so let's get rid of this old one let's go add action go to url all right let's give it whatever name you can you want to give it and this basically is when you click the sheet itself so when you click anything on here it will activate this action all right so i'm going to say only click on sub category all right we want it to be select and where where do we want to go well we can just go to google for for now as a test we'll test the link right you can see it's opened up google great no problem at all and we can just change this setting which is basically just open a new tab or browser tab if no web page object exists a lot of times i don't even change this i just leave it as such so you can take it to normal links or you can take it to something in your own company right something on your intranet uh maybe like a specialized page maybe a link on tableau online for a particular dashboard something like that so we go okay and okay so when i click on this right takes me straight to google right pretty cool feature right let's go to the next action right and that's go to sheet let's get rid of this other one first okay and we can go go to sheet so this one is really useful again we'll leave them both on and we'll make the target sheet um let's say actually let's go build it right so i'm going to build something that's a lot more detailed than this and there's a reason i want to do that so let's say i have um manufacturer we've got the discount uh maybe not discount maybe i've got profit per order or maybe nothing but negatives in it uh let's just go quantity something basic i'm gonna go to attack the bubble and we're going to go by subcategory in the colors right and this is just to add a bit of color to your day if you're feeling a bit blue okay so let's say um in in like a business setting so it would be you know mr jed you know let's let's see the latest results i go no worries mr manager sir here we go so we got technology here let's turn this on all right we got technology here and we got the cop uh we've got accessories oh i forgot to turn off the action hang on one second let's just get rid of these get rid of this one right so in a meeting you go all right well you know furniture's not doing really good and and the question is going to be well what's in there well we got bookcases chairs tables and furnishings well what's going on with furnishings what's that made of and when you click on furnishings well nothing happens so it's kind of the end of the conversation so you want it to kind of be free-flowing but you may also not want to show that much that much detail or whatever it might be it could be you know tree map or something like that right and you may not want to show it in that much detail here because either they nev they're not going to actually ask it and also this could just be a summary page for senior executives right so you want to keep it relatively clean so you wanted that if they do ask that question when you click on something it will take you somewhere where you can answer that question so we can add an action here so dashboard actions let's go that's fine let's add another one go to sheet we're going to go sub category only which is where we're clicking and take us to sheet3 all right which is that packed bubble we made we go okay and okay so we go furniture all right great let's talk about furnishings and we can go in here and then maybe we'll have a sub category button like so show filter go single select right and then from here we can continue the conversation go well here's what we have in furnishings right so you can have one link to another to another to another right so that is how you use um what was this called go to sheet so the next one next ones we're going to cover are a bit more advanced so you can pretty much um end it here if you don't want to if you don't want to keep watching but if you want to learn some really cool stuff we're going to learn how you can use actions to change parameters and how you can change actions to chain uh to modify sets right so what is actually in a set so we're gonna get started on that part right now all right we're all cleaned up and i've got rid of all the actions i believe they're all gone so let's start fresh and what we're going to look at is parameters right how are we going to use the visualization and actions to change a parameter right so let's first start by building a parameter let's go create parameter and i'm going to call this parameter word right so there's two kinds of parameters well there's multiple but we're going to do two as an example right first one is a word we're going to change this to a string and the idea is i want this parameter to equal whatever i click in here so if i click on phones it's going to change the parameter to the word phones right and then the second example we'll do is when you click it i'm going to change the parameter to whatever the value i select is all right so let's leave that as the let's use art as the starting word and go okay all right so we've got the word in here the parameter and we're going to go to a calculation let's call this calc param word all right and we're just going to make an equal parameter word and the only reason i'm doing this is so we can display them at the same time for training so you can actually see when it changes right so we go okay and let's build a dashboard let's bring in subcategory and we're going to bring in that param word all right so let's go pram word sheets i'll make this nice and large let's say like this put that in the middle and let's bring the word in here all right so the idea is when i click on chairs or anything like this i want this to change all right so if i go dashboard actions i'm going to go add action we're going to go change parameter all right so what we're going to be clicking on is sub uh subcategory so that is our source sheet we want it to be on click right on select and the target parameter basically the one we want to modify on this action is the parameter word we just created right and then what do we want to change it with well we have two choices category and subcategory and what's in this list is what you've used to actually build this visualization so you can only see subcategory but why is category showing up well that's because we've used category as the color right so it shows you all the dimensions you could possibly use for this example we're going to use subcategory and then for the aggregation we're just going to leave it as none and go okay and go okay so when i click storage you can see it's changing now now you're probably like oh cool i've changed the names but a parameter can be used in all sorts of ways and i have videos on parameters so check those out it's an entire subject unto itself so i won't cover it here but once you can start doing this kind of stuff you can start connecting parameters to um to formulas you can connect it to more like logic based functions you can start adding it into coloring and sorting and grouping all sorts of things you can do with it so that is part one of this the second part is how do you change a number so let's do another parameter and we're going to call this parameter you can probably guess oh wrong one um parameter number so parameter number oh we'll do the full word all right and we'll just leave this as a float right floating point value i think that's what it's called and let's set it to 10 000 and we'll make the display format i think it was currency anyway all right that'll do just so we can have i just want the comment in there just so you can kind of see it for this example right parameter word and we're going to do a calculation and the yeah again the reason we're doing calculation is because i can't bring this straight in here to display it for this video so that's why you have to refer to the parameter with the calculation so let's call this calc param word and we're just going to go parameter word okay oh hang on uh no it's not word it's number oh geez it's late parameter number all right let's bring this into the label entire view and you're going to notice something straight away this number is massive and i'll explain why that is massive all right so let's go bring it in so let's call this param number let's bring it in here okay let's do the dashboard action pretending that we haven't seen that error i'm going to go change parameter same thing so we're going to go sub category as our source the target parameter in this case is the number and the field is the sum of sales because that's the only measure that's really here so that's what we're going to use and we're going to leave this as sum because we're summing here and okay okay so what i can expect to see is if i click storage this will will change to 376 000 all right so it is changing great that means the action works but why is the value so high well if we go back to the sheet the reason is this should not be sum it should be dimension all right so that's really the reason for it um but it's good to always kind of trust your instincts of like something's not right here and just have a look into it let's just format that quickly uh currency like that and we can see 114 62 370 and i think you can change this to multiples as well so let's say these two yes 797 so you can change it on multiples or sums of multiple selections so that is how you change parameters so that's kind of like gives you a taste of the possibilities and the kind of craziness you can do with tableau right as you start learning new things the last thing we're going to learn is how do you use actions to change sets all right so let's do a little recap of what sets are so let's say i have some category sales oh my throat's really dry i just had a kebab and um some chips and a solo at like one in the morning oh it was great if you live in australia and you know you know what it's like having a kebab at like one in the morning it's just the greatest thing ever so if you're one of those people who love it just you know comment below and just say oh i love me some kebabs and you know then i mad respect so anyways getting back to this let's create a set right so a set really has just two groups in or out a group you can do individual groups right you can have five groups ten groups in a whole collection of your data whereas in a set it's just in or out so let's call this um action set test and we go okay all right and now we have this set here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to add it to color and i'm going to add it here into rows right so that they're separated okay let's change these colors up a little bit the gray is just way too sad for me all right let's do let's put this into a dashboard okay all right so pretty standard and what i'm also going to do is i'm going to do another one let's call this um set sub cat let's do another one of um sales by that set right so we have them kind of consolidated let's make this a pie chart right with labels and entire view make it a little bit larger all right let's call this pie and let's add it in here get rid of this okay here we go so let's say i'm doing some sort of deep dive analysis or i'm having a meeting and it was agreed upon a week ago jed these are the five groups that we're going to be using and this is the visualization report and let's move on and then the very last second and anyone who's worked in the professional world knows that after telling everybody um these are the five these are the five you put it in emails and everything and everyone's like yep good good good good the very last second when you're about to submit someone goes oh maybe you should add machines you know you're just like oh my gosh and then you have to redo everything so one thing you can do is actually control what is in each group without actually explicitly going right click add to set and all that stuff right you can do that with action so let me show you how it works so if we go dashboard actions we're going to go add action change set values all right so again same thing source sheets is the set sub cat it's on select all right now here's where it gets a little bit kind of a little bit iffy for me so the set we're going to be modifying is the action set test the only one we have right and for now i'm going to leave these as is all right let's press ok and let's press ok so let's see what happens when i select something right it suddenly changed the one i selected to be the only one in the in if i click again now everything's in the in so what it does is by default by not selecting anything you can choose what goes in or out right so now those are the only ones that are in and you can see anything connected to that set in terms of a visualization is also modifying itself right so you can change things on the fly now this opens up heaps of possibilities because you can also do calculations offsets right because a set is really just a true and false statement right it's either in or out yes or no one or zero right um let's modify some of those settings all right so now i'm going to go add values to set so we're going to do these one by one and let's see what happens so we'll leave that as add all values all right so if i click this again let's see what happens all right so nothing and i think it's because i got that that one wrong all right no no hang on this worked really well in my practice round and now it's embarrassing me hang on uh let's actually start there let's go back and let's set that one to there keep set values we'll start on the other way maybe that's why all right so now that's doing some stuff so what the difference this time is if you click that first one right let's have click these these are in the in when i deactivate it everything stays in place right instead of it resetting so now let's go to the other one and you'll see that's right this is what i was doing before in my practice remove all values from set it does the other way so by default they're all in the out so it just depends what kind of behavior you want and you can play with the three now personally i don't remember all the time because i'm not building sets all the time but it's pretty easy to switch them back and forth to really get the behavior you want ultimately all right let's go and check this one add values to set actually let's try the last one because i can't remember what that one's doing remove values from set right oh i remember now i just had to pause it and do a little quick recap all right so it's the way you read this so um this is kind of i kind of wish tableau will change this because you can't have all settings um corresponding so for example running the action will add values to the set right but clearing the actions will add all values to set so that doesn't make any sense so one has to add them one has to remove them so it's kind of like always opposing forces so let's say i do remove values from a set when i select that means when i deselect it either i'm going to keep them or add them all back in if i do remove all values from a set well then i can't have the same behavior twice otherwise it will just lock into place and nothing will happen so that is the main difference between those so just be sure that you're always choosing something to bring the data back or um to kind of reset the data set all right and that is basically um like 95 of all the things you can do with actions and if you end up finding some really cool ways or you end up using in your project please let me know i'd love to hear about your story of how it all happens but until then i hope you guys enjoyed and i will see you next time

Channel: Jellyman Education

Views: 1,135

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: How to use Dashboard Actions, Actions, Dashboard Actions, Parameters, Sets, Highlight, Dynamic, Use as Filter, HOW TO, TUTORIAL, TABLEAU, TABLEAU TRAINING FOR BEGINNERS, DATA VISUALIZATION, DATA ANALYSIS, TABLEAU TUTORIAL, BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, DATA ANALYTICS, ANALYTICS, BUSINESS ANALYTICS, TABLEAU TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS, TABLEAU FOR BEGINNERS, VISUAL DATA, LEARN TABLEAU, BUSINESS ANALYSIS, HOW TO VIDEO, TABLEAU TRAINING, DATA VISUALIZATION TOOLS

Id: g5hOKyF7YSc

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020