Tableau Master Challenge #2 – Solution

Welcome back to our Unilytics Tableau Master Challenge, the second in this series. If you didn’t see the Tableau Master Challenge #2 blog post, you can see it here with details of the challenge and what you have to accomplish to succeed.

What seemed easy at first was the fact that we know how to configure a filter to apply to a specific view. That’s no challenge. What’s a tad obscure is how to bring that filter into the dashboard since the main view we want to affect is not present on the dashboard we’re currently working on. Here’s an example of our two dashboards:

 

Figure 1
Figure 2

So, let’s just bring one of those views into the dashboard. It’s that simple. Except it isn’t. Our design doesn’t require any view on the second dashboard; it’s only for filters.

The solution is to bring the view from our main dashboard, the one in Figure 1, into our secondary dashboard. Once that’s done, you’re ready and able to import the necessary filters into the secondary dashboard, as illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 3
If there’s more than one view in your primary dashboard (Figure 1), it doesn’t matter which view you use. The filters can be configured individually afterwards to apply to however many views we choose.
Once all our filters are onboard, if we were to delete the view from the secondary dashboard, all our filters would go as well.

The solution is to select our view and modify its size and then it’s position.

Figure 4
The size, we change it to is
• Width: 1px
• Height: 1px

Note: we’re setting the width and height to 1 per 1 pixel because we can’t set the value to zero.

Then the position should be set to
• x: -1
• y: -1

 

 

That will give the view the size of a dot and then we’ll position that dot off-screen. And isn’t that neat!
Let’s go through the process step by step.

1. Create a primary dashboard.
2. Create a secondary dashboard that will include all our quick-filters.
3. Import, from the list of Sheets, the main view from the primary dashboard into the secondary dashboard. Import the view as Floating, as opposed to Tiled.
4. Right-click on the top border of the floating view and from the contextual menu, go into the Filters sub-menu and select the Filters you need into the secondary dashboard.
5. Position and configure each quick-filter into the dashboard. When all the necessary quick-filters have been imported into the secondary dashboard, configured and adequately positioned, we can turn our attention to the floating view (from the primary dashboard).
6. Select the floating view by clicking on it.
7. Select the Layout tab. a) Change the Size of the floating view to 1 pixel wide and 1 pixel high. b) Change the position of the floating window to -1 and -1.

Quick Tip
Should you need, at some later date, to import additional quick-filters into this secondary dashboard, here’s how you might want to go about doing it.

Go to the secondary dashboard, select the hidden view from the left-hand-side menu, and set the position of the view to something like 100 by 100 and the width and height to say 250 by 250. What this will do is re-position the view inside the visible boundaries of the dashboard as well as give it a width and height (hopefully) visible to the naked eye.

This concludes the solution to our second Tableau Master Challenge blog post. We hope you’ve enjoyed it, and please keep an eye out for our Tableau Master Challenge #3. If you found this challenging, take a look at our Tableau Master Class training course. We offer two day training courses that address topics like this, as well as other advanced Tableau concepts.

Don’t hesitate to contact us should you have any question.

 

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