Tableau Tip | Creating A Dynamic Bar Chart With Set Actions

Interactivity is a core component of good Tableau dashboards. It creates a better user experience, and can help your audience find deeper insights in their data. In Tableau, one way of introducing interactivity is through Set Actions.

A quick overview of Set Actions

As Bethany Lyons, a senior product manager at Tableau writes:

“Set actions feature extends the interactivity in Tableau, allowing for deeper, more diverse comparisons through user selections and opportunities to see your data in a new light… Set actions make interactivity more expressive, providing precise control on dashboard design without any programming. They enable users to design a variety of custom responses to end user interactions. It’s now possible to coordinate different behaviours across multiple visualisations with a single selection, creating nearly endless compositions.”

Creating A Dynamic Bar Chart With Set Actions

In this tutorial I demonstrate how to create a dynamic drill down  bar chart using set actions – allowing users to filter their view from from a higher to lower level of granularity with the click of a button.

This is particularly useful if you want to display a high level of detail on a dataset, but are restricted by space on your Tableau dashboard.

Formulas: