Websites often have page trails that help users to find their way around the site. Similarly, in Tableau, we can add features that will help business users to reduce the number of actions that they need to take in order to navigate through the workbook. These actions can help to make worksheets more findable in a Tableau workbook. Findable refers to the ease with which a website can be found, and it is also relevant to finding pages within a Tableau workbook.
Linking workbooks together is an effective visual tool that helps the user to understand where they are in terms of the user's location within the workbook. It also helps to add context. In this recipe, we will look at user-oriented trails in a Tableau workbook.
In this recipe, we will use the existing workbook that you created earlier in this chapter. If you have taken the Number of Records field and put it onto the white canvas, remove it.
Overview
.FactInternetSales
table and place it onto the white canvas.SalesTerritoryCountry
attribute, and drag it onto the white canvas.FactInternetSales
table and place it onto the Color button on the Marks shelf.Product Category Detail
worksheet. Now that we have an Overview
worksheet, we will create a Product Category Detail
worksheet that we would like to navigate to. To do this, simply right-click on the tab and select Duplicate Sheet.Product Category Detail
.DimProductCategory
dimension, look for the attribute EnglishProductCategoryName
, and drag it to the Rows shelf.Overview
worksheet and they are presented with the Product Category Detail
worksheet. To add an action, go to the Worksheet menu item and choose the Actions… option. You can see where to find this option in the following screenshot:We have three options, as follows:
Overview
worksheet as the source sheet, and the Product Category Detail
worksheet as the target sheet.Overview
worksheet and right-clicking on a country, and then Tableau shows you the Product Category Detail
worksheet. So, for example, if you click on Australia, then the Product Category Detail
worksheet will appear as you can see in the following screenshot:In this recipe, we have used actions so that we can create worksheets that are more detailed than the Overview
worksheet. Research has shown that people tend to prefer to navigate from the summary data down towards the details, so our page trails will work in the same way.
An important item to note is the item marked Target Sheets, which was circled in the previous illustration. This feature allows you to preserve the filter or release the filter when the user goes from one worksheet to another. In our example, we preserved the filter. This means that we are facilitating user navigation by going from a summary view to a more detailed, filtered view.
Why did we only choose three colors to represent the SalesAmount value? We are not distinguishing the colors at a fine-grained level. Instead, we are using color to broadly distinguish the value of SalesAmount into three categories. The lower values are represented by a light color, and the higher values are represented by a darker color—a more intense blue. Research has shown that people tend to associate lighter colors with smaller values, and more intense, bright, or dark colors with higher values. You can follow this up by looking at Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, Second Edition, Stephen Few, Analytics Press.
Using color in this way does not provide you detail, but it can help you to see patterns in the data very quickly. This is extremely useful for dashboarding.