#WorkoutWednesday2019
W01 - Sales Drill Down using Set Actions
Admittedly, I saw Luke Stanke’s initial tweet about this back in November. His exploration into set actions, along with the work of Lindsey Poulter, the presentations at #TC18, and previous Workout Wednesdays, have really brought some fantastic exposure to this (amazing) new feature. Furthermore, an earlier challenge by Rody Zakovich to create a single sheet drill down served as reference for a project at work.¹
The example by Rody allowed me to become accustomed to the data structure to complete this type of challenge at an earlier date. This familiarity made me immediately focus on a couple of things:
Union the data
Create two new fields: Level CD & Level DSC
Using the Tableau-generated Table Name field (that created Orders and Orders$) I began creating the Level CD field as an integer:
Following this, I focused on the Level DSC field that is typically displayed to users, keeping in mind it needed to be slightly different due to the format Luke put in the challenge:
But wait, we only wanted to show the Sub-Category items (Level CD: 2) when the Category is selected! Due to this and the knowledge of what was expected, it was clear we needed to create a Category set (Set_Category). Let’s set this to “Furniture” for now. Afterward, modify Level DSC to take this into consideration.
One more step: exclude the Sub-Categories that are not of interest (those under “Office Supplies” and “Technology”. There are (at least) 2 ways you could do this:
Now onto the fun part: set actions.
I added the sheet to a dashboard and created a Set Action to change Set_Category upon clicking on the sheet (and selected “remove all values from set” upon clearing the selection).
Voila! We’ve done it. For added measure, why not make the tooltips fun so it shows the hierarchy?
There was a request to allow a dashboard focusing on ambulatory locations within our health system to be compared across different levels of grouping with drill down functionality.
