Vizible Difference

A search box allows us to find records in a data set using a keyword.

There are a number of ways to create a search box in Tableau. It depends on what you want to do. There are in general two kinds of searches: Dimension search or Global search.

Dimension Search

There are two ways to search within a dimension or a column.

- dimension filter search box

Each dimension filter has a search box embedded within. Just drop down the menu list and the search box will appear.

- wildcard search box

The second way is to set up the dimension filter as a wildcard filter, among options like single-select or multi-select filters. This approach is used in this Khan Academy viz.

Global Search

Sometimes we need to search in multiple columns or even all the columns. There come two approaches as well.

This is another attempt at visualizing database data dictionary. Comparing to an earlier effort, this time we added views on the foreign key relationship between the tables.

There are two major objectives in this viz design:

- Providing search to table descriptions

- Visualizing foreign key reference relationship

Here we are using the Tableau server repository data dictionary as the example. The dictionary is evolving along time. It may be quite different from what I have in the dashboard.