By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx for 5 years. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.
Imagine you are working on the following dashboard:
You’re pleased with where it’s at overall, but you’ve run into a dilemma. The dashboard helps answer the overall question “Where should we invest our marketing dollars?”, but it’s very hard to compare individual states. Maps are great for high-level geographic overviews but poor for comparing individual values.
For instance, how can we decide if Idaho or Arizona is a better place to invest in marketing? The sales per customer and profit ratio values look almost exactly the same on this visual.
This is a great opportunity for a worksheet swap. We can provide a dropdown (looks like a filter) that lets our end user switch the visual from a map to a bar chart so they can perform minute comparisons. Here’s how we’ll do it.
Step 1, create the alternate sheet:
Step 2, put both worksheets together in in a vertical layout container in the dashboard:
Step 3, create a parameter which gives the end user the choice between looking at a map or a bar chart:
Step 4, create a calculated field that just has the parameter you just created in the dialogue:
Step 5, show the parameter control on the alternate worksheet and select the corresponding value from the parameter dropdown:
Step 6, add the calculation from step four to the filters card in the worksheet and make sure the value is selected:
Step 7, go to the original worksheet, show the parameter control, and switch the dropdown to the corresponding value:
Step 8, add the calculation from step four to the filters card in the worksheet and make sure the value is selected:
Step 9, return to the dashboard and notice that only one worksheet is displaying:
Step 10, hide the title from the second worksheet:
Step 11, add the parameter to the dashboard:
Step 12, place the parameter in the appropriate place and let you end user customize as necessary:
With this switch, we can now more easily see that the profit ratio in Colorado is significantly higher than in Arizona, which means that may be a better place to invest the marketing spend long-term.
Note; this method isn’t limited to two worksheets. You can add as many sheets as you want. It’s hard to make much more than four work but it is possible. You would just repeat steps 5 and 6 as many times as necessary to incorporate all the worksheets you want to be able to switch between.
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