Hiding Secondary Columns in an Asymmetric Drill Down (Tableau Set Actions)

By: Eric Parker

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Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. 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.

If you’ve been reading the OneNumber blog for a while, you likely saw a post last year about using the Set Action feature to create asymmetric drill downs. If that sounds like a bunch of gibberish, you can get caught up to speed by reading this post. The short version is that an asymmetric drill down lets you choose which area of your data you’d like to drill into as opposed to the hierarchy feature which drills down on all data at once.

Drill down using the standard hierarchy feature:

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Drill down using set actions:

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One of the bummers about using set actions for drill down is that the drill down column (i.e. Countries) shows up even when nothing is drilled down.

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One option is to hide the secondary column.

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If you choose that approach, the drill down still works, but there are no country names to reference.

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To solve that issue, you can add the Countries field to labels on the bar and left align the text.

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(The only drawback to this approach is that if you have a short bar or long label the label can be too long to fit in the bar).

For those now griping (in their heads) that with the country name on labels there is no way to label the end of the bars with the numeric values as well, that isn’t actually true!

You can add a second copy of the measure to Columns and add the measure to Labels on the Marks card. Those labels can be right-aligned.

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Those two bars can be turned into a dual axis chart.

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After setting the chart to dual axis, there may be some formatting needs (set mark type to Bar, Synchronize the axis, hide the second header).

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Once that’s all done, you have a chart that can drill down based on a selection without having a blank extra column when there are no selections!

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