1. Video tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyGZPuI0oXo

    Following the previous post, my colleague said the trick doesn't work for him, because his buttons are placed in different sheets. BTW, a button here means any data mark where action is initiated via selecting. Note that when the buttons are on different sheets, a button may stay selected but won't be dimmed.
    Then I devised a new scheme where buttons are on 2 different sheets. When selecting one, it deselects the button on the other sheet. There could be more than one buttons on the other sheet.

    It takes the following key steps:

    - Create a parameter with two values (more values if more sheets for swapping), each value corresponding to the Sheet dimension of each button.
    - Create one filter per sheet for sheet selection
    - Set up deselect action 
    - Set up parameter action for sheet swap

    See the previous article for creating both parameters and sheet select filters. 

    But the deselect action and parameter action are a bit different from the previous case where buttons are on the same sheet. A button will need to stay selected until another button is selected.

    Set up deselect action

    - Create a calculated field True whose content is True as well in both Button sheets
    - Create a filter action for each sheet as follows
    - Make sure to use True field to target the same True field in the other Button sheet(s).
    - We need to create as many actions as buttons.

    Set up Parameter Action for sheet swap

    - Need to set up as many actions as buttons
    That's all. You can download the demo workbook here.

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  2. Video Tutorials
    How to create Sheet Swap via Parameter Action
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XERIMcLcSVc
    How to De-Select Buttons in Tableau Dashboard
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7fEt0H6LiY

    A colleague ran into a little problem: He created an action-driven sheet swap dashboard, where he has two buttons. Clicking one button will show one sheet and clicking the other button will show another sheet. However one button remains selected even after clicking the other one. This is annoying. BTW, Tableau Zen Master Joshua Milligan provided a solution for deselecting navigation buttons long time ago. Kind of a oft-met UI issue.

    Based on an approach originally proposed by Yuri Val, I am going to create a simple example of parameter action-driven sheet swap with button deselection as well as button de-dim.

    First let's create a simple table with one column and two rows:
    • Sheet
    • 1
    • 2
    We name this table as Button and import it into Tableau as a data source. Then we create a worksheet with two buttons.

    Before selecting a button
    After selecting a button, the other will become dimmed.
    What we expect to have is, after a button is clicked, it is deselected right away instead of staying selected. And the other button is de-dimmed in the mean time.

    Using Yuri's approach we created two calculated fields True and False with content the same as the name True and False respectively.
    Then let's create the sheet swap mechanism, given that we have created two charts (from two different data sources).

    - Create a parameter Sheet Select with two values 1 and 2.
    - Create sheet filters Sheet1 and Sheet2 in respective data sources:
    • Sheet Select =1
    and 
    • Sheet Select = 2
    and place them in their respective chart filter shelf.
    - Create a container and drop the two sheets into it.

    Last, set up two dashboard actions in dashboard as follows:
    - Parameter action that drives the sheet selection
    - Filter action that deselects/de-dims button
    Feel free to download the workbook for practice and for learning more about sheet swap and button deselection/de-dimming.

    The above approach can be applied to more than two sheets swapping. In case of N>2 sheets, we need to have a N-value parameter, assigning one value to the filter of each of the N sheets.

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  3. Just heard the news that Professor John Conway has succumbed to COVID-19. Really sorry to hear that. John is the inventor of the Game of Life which has a huge influence in computer science. I would like to dedicate this implementation of Game of Life in Tableau to him, a great mathematician and educator! RIP
    Last year, I decided to give the Game of Life a run in Tableau, after a few earlier projects in cellular automata. It took me awhile to get all the logic right. In the process, I have written probably one of the most complex Tableau formula of my life. But I enjoyed every bit of it.
    Yes, we can do it in Tableau and here is the workbook.

    There is no play button for it because it's not based on paging. We can play it only one step at a time via the slider. Hope that Tableau can play it automatically in the future!

    RIP, Professor Conway! Your legacy will stay alive for a very long time.
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  4. The purpose of this post is to help people read text tables fast with the aid of simple visual hints.

    Excel style text tables remain a mainstay for quantitative data representation because of tradition, habit, high density of information per area, high information to ink ratio. They are here stay. Graphical data visualization won't replace them. The best hope is the coexistence of both.

    You may have seen following text tables with visual background in Tableau Server web pages or Tableau Data Prep desktop.
    Here we are going to show you how we can implement this using Tableau Desktop.

    There are a few ways we can add visual background to text tables: 1) horizontal bar 2) symmetric bar 3) heat map. Plus no background, below are four ways of showing the same column of numbers.
    Heat map is really useful in high density low space tables where quantitative differential perception is not as important. Bars can be more useful in medium density tables with adequate spaces to show the size of the measures. We are going to present the two cases of bars: horizontal and symmetrical bars. Some of the techniques are based on the conditional formatting in Tableau. Please take a look at this viz by Jonathan Drummey.

    1.Horizontal bars as background

    - For each measure, we will use two columns Sum(0) and Sum(0). One column Sum(0) will use Gantt chart for creating bars. The other Sum(0) will serve for the Text Label (center-aligned). Then dual axis them to merge the two together and have the column headers on top.

    Adjust the opacity of the bars to be visible yet not too bright. We want the text to be more visible than the background.

    - We will use Sum(Measure) as Size. In case of Profit and Profit Ratio, where there are both positive and negative numbers, we will use ABS(Sum(Measure)) or ABS(Profit Ratio) for Size, Sign(Sum(Measure)) or Sign(Profit Ratio) for Color, where Profit Ratio is an aggregated measure already.

    - The header is not your regular one. It results from editing the axis. Edit the title of the axis and hide the tick marks.
    2.Symmetric bars as background

     - We will use two columns Sum(0) and Sum(-Measure/2) or -ABS(Sum(Measure/2) ) for each column of a Measure. Sum(-Measure/2)  will shift the bars halfway towards left. Note that there is no further aggregation in case of Profit Ratio which is an aggregated measure already.

    - Again we will use Gantt chart for the bars. The Size is still using Sum(Measure) or ABS(Sum(Measure)) .

    - Dual axis them. The formatting of headers is similar to the above horizontal bars.
    Voila, we just showed how to add visual backgrounds to a text table. Some like the horizontal bars as background. Personally I like the symmetric bars more.

    We can also apply the same technique mixing with other graphical representations, showing secondary measures such as follows.
    More details can be found in the example workbook here.
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