How to Disable Highlighting in Tableau

Have you ever wanted to get rid of that pesky ‘greying out’ effect Tableau does when you click on something? Maybe you have a sexy parameter action? Or perhaps you aren’t vibing with the washed-out colours. Well, whatever the case, here’s a quick guide to removing the highlighting effect Tableau effect the easy way (which doesn’t involve hiding everything with a transparent box)!

 

Create a new measure

I’ve seen this process overly complicated more times than I have fingers on my right hand. But really, this doesn’t have to be more interesting than creating a calc called 1 with the value 1. That’s right, no LODs, no complex equations tailored to your unique dataset, literally ‘1’.

 

Add it as a dimension to details

The next step won’t work unless it’s a dimension, so drag ‘1’ onto details and change that calc into a dimension!

Create the Action

If you haven’t done this before, go Worksheet -> Actions (top bar). Create a Highlight Action and configure ‘Target Highlighting’ to Selected Fields, and select our ultra-new-highly-sophisticated field ‘1’.

Update: To get this working on the dashboard, go Dashboard -> Actions 😉

That’s it. You’re done.

Really isn’t any more complex than that. If you’re wondering why this works, you’ve associated every item on your dashboard with ‘1’, then made anything you click on highlight everything with ‘1’, which is everything. So it highlights everything and this overrides the default highlight action. And because highlighting actually means ‘highlight by greying everything else out’, it disables highlighting.

 

 

As always, thanks for taking the time to read my blog! If you have any comments, suggestions or want to chat, free to connect with me on my LinkedIn!
~ Ryan Edwards