In a previous blog article here, I reviewed how to use the Navigation Objects in Tableau. I also covered how to embed a Navigation Bar using Tableau's Web Page Objects in this article here. In this blog post, I want to review how to use the Go to Sheet Action and a use case for this action.
Why?
Use Case: One good dashboard design example is to have a main dashboard to serve as a high level overview. On this main dashboard you would cover KPI's and other important metrics for your clients. Then a second dashboard would cover a more detailed view of the metrics. It would be a nice feature for your client to click part of the main dashboard and then automatically see the detail behind that metric. One way to do this would be to navigate your user to that second dashboard through the Go to Sheet Dashboard Action.
Bonus Design Feature: You can also add Download Buttons on that second dashboard for your client to download that filtered view to Excel or a PDF!
Disadvantage: If you have a PDF Download Button you need to advise your client to select "Specific Sheets from this dashboard" or they will only download an image of the filtered view. It will not display all of the data.
You can see an example of this in my Tableau Public Dashboard here.
In my Tableau workbook I needed to create two actions. The first dashboard action would be to filter the Detail view on the metric your user selects. The second dashboard action would be the Go to Sheet Action.
First Dashboard Action
First I will click on the Dashboard menu and then select Actions. Next I select Filter for the Action. In the Action print screen below you can see I have the first dashboard and the main worksheet selected. For the Target sheet I have the Filtered Detail Sheet selected.
This action will filter the Detail sheet on Sub-Category. The important thing to note is that the Sub-Category field will need to be on both worksheets in order for this action to work.
Second Dashboard Action
For the second action, on the Actions pop-up menu, I selected the Go to Sheet Action.
I configured this second action as below;
I have the Main Sheet as the source sheet and then for the Target Sheets I have the Detail dashboard selected.
Feel free to review the dashboard in Tableau Public to see how this dashboard is configured.