In all the visualizations I’ve built and encountered throughout my journey, filters have been an essential tool for slicing and dicing data to achieve the desired view. They’ve helped me focus on the most relevant information while adding interactivity and flexibility to the dashboard experience. However, filters narrow your view by excluding data. But what if you want to highlight specific categories while comparing them against the rest? Well, that’s where sets come in! Sets allow us to create a subgroup within the dataset and highlight those selected groups, without hiding other data. I’ll provide a scenario where using sets is particularly useful in understanding the data and walk you through how you can do it yourself.
Scenario
Imagine you are a department store buying director that oversees a few categories. As part of your category reviews, you would like to understand the profit generated from each sub-category and their contribution to your overall business. In this scenario, using filters to select a category will only show me the profits within that category without providing context around other categories’ performance or the overall business performance. To overcome this, we can utilize sets. To follow along utilize the tableau superstore dataset.
Walkthrough to utilize sets
- Create a category set, which can be done by right clicking the category dimension. Create à This will create a new dimension.
2. Add subcategory into rows, and sum of profit into columns, to create a horizontal bar chart.
3. Now drag the category set into colors in the marks card. This will create a (IN/OUT color legend which will highlight the selected categories differentiating them from the unselected categories). Suggestion: Utilize the analytics tab to add a grand total to your visualization. This will highlight the portion of total profit from selected categories against the business total.
4. Tidy up the chart by adding labels and utilizing appropriate formatting for the numbers.
Difference with Filters
Now that you can see how sets can help you solve the scenario presented. But what if you had used filters instead, what would have happened?
If you recreate a new worksheet and add the category dimension to filters you will notice that making selections removes the other sub-categories from your view. So, your visibility on the performance of other sub-categories and the overall business is lost, hindering your decision making.
While there are scenarios where filters reign king in adding interactivity to your dashboards, sets can provide you with an alternative approach that highlights data without removing them from your view.
