By: Eric Parker
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. You can follow him on LinkedIn or sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
Users love text tables. No matter how much we steer them toward data visualizations that do a better job of exposing patterns, outliers and areas of interest, many users are still most comfortable viewing data in a table.
I am hesitant to sacrifice too much screen real estate to a worksheet which is going to be used primarily as a lookup table. There are a number of solutions which allow users to view a table of data based on a selection including view in tooltip and creating a secondary dashboard comprised of the data table. However, those solutions have drawbacks when it comes to interactivity and navigation.
One of my favorite solutions is to have the text table expand / appear when users make a selection and collapse / disappear when they deselect a value. By creatively utilizing dashboard filter actions and layout containers, you too can create lookup, interactive text tables which expand and collapse at the bottom of your Tableau dashboard based on user selections.
Check out this video to learn how!
Access/download the Tableau Workbook from the demo here.
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