Tying Tableau Dashboards Together with Highlight Actions

By: Eric Parker

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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.

Highlight actions provide a powerful way to tie together related information in Tableau dashboards. Consider the following example:

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Now, imagine we want to be able to focus on just the districts in Eastern Washington. We can easily set that up with a filter action.

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The problem with the filter action is we lost context. How are those districts doing compared to the districts in Western Washington? Because of change blindness, it’s difficult to tell.

However, if we use a highlight action, comparing the districts will be markedly easier. Here’s how to create a highlight action in a Tableau dashboard.

First, we’ll select Dashboard from the toolbar, select Actions and then select Add Action.

Next we’ll set the dashboard action up like so:

 
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When we hover over the first worksheet, it should now highlight the related districts in the second sheet.

However, in actuality, nothing is being highlighted and everything is grayed out:

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This is a common issue. When setting up a highlight action, it’s important that whatever field you want to highlight on is present in both the source and target worksheets to create a “bridge” of sorts.

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After adding the field to the secondary worksheet on Detail, the highlight action should work correctly.

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