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!
How often do you build a Tableau dashboard and feel like it has too many filters? This happens to me all the time! You don't know what to do with them, right? Make two rows of filters? Ugh. Make a massive column? That's a lot of screen real estate. Add show/hide buttons so users can toggle a layout container on and off the page? That doesn't seem ideal either. What if someone doesn't realize they can show filters?
What about this? Narrow down your top 5-7 filters and leave those showing for your users. Then, for the remaining filters (which are hopefully used less often), combine them into a single, swappable "Additional Filter" which the user can select from.
This is a solution my great client Seattle Colleges and I came up with when we had too many filters on a dashboard. It provides the ability to select from many additional demographic filters without sacrificing space and cluttering the dashboard.
The only small drawback is that only one of those additional filters can be selected at a time. So in this use case, you could Select "Veteran" from [Veteran Status] or "High School" and "Some College" from the [Prior Edu] option, but you couldn't filter to "Veteran" + "Some College".
Ready to learn how you can combine numerous filters into a single, swappable filter on your Tableau dashboard? Check out this video!
Access/download the Tableau Workbook from the demo here.
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