Interactivity in Tableau

Tableau is good at creating visualizations for us using a few-clicks. However, when it comes to interactivity among visualizations, we have to do it all by ourselves by using the features provided in Tableau – this can be a daunting task (as evidenced during assignment #3 🙂 ). To make our lives a little easier, let’s take a quick look at some of these features and see how we can use them for our speed violations data set.

Filters are one of the most basic interactive feature that can be used in Tableau. They are primarily used to engage the user’s attention to a subset of the data. Let’s take a look at how we can add filters to our visualization:

  • Using Keep Only/Exclude option: Using this option, the user can select the data points which he/she is interested in and then keep those only in the visualization for deeper analysis. This can be achieved by selecting the data points in the visualization through several clicks or dragging and then choosing whether to retain (Keep Only option) the selected data points or exclude (Exclude option) them from the view using the Tableau prompt. As an example, say we have the map for Chicago with the addresses marked as per violations reported. The user can focus on different parts (for e.g. north, south, east, and west) of the city by selecting addresses in the region and then using Keep Only option for further analysis.
  • Using filter shelf: The user can drag different dimensions and measures into the filter shelf to apply a filter. This option gives the user a wide variety of options, such as range, condition, wildcard, etc., to apply the filter depending on the parameter which is being used. Let’s take the same example which we used above, the user can do a wildcard filter for addresses having the string “N WESTERN” in it (there are seven unique addresses with this string in our exercise data set!).
  • Interactive filter as a card: The user can be given the ability to filter in/out of the dataset by having an interactive filter card along with the visualization. This can be achieved by clicking on the drop-down menu for the field in either the row or column and then select “Show Filter”. This will open up a filter card for the selected field, next to the visualization. Using the same example, we will have a filter card with options to select “All” the addresses or individual ones. This filter can be modified to be presented in various ways such as “Single Value”, “Multiple Value”, or “Wildcard Match”.

We will take a look at sets, groups, and actions in the upcoming blogs!

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