Most people think parameters can only hold one value. But what if I told you… you can hack them to hold two? In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you how to build a dynamic date range using just a single parameter... yes, really. You’ll get: ✅ The exact calculations ✅ Step-by-step setup ✅ A powerful technique few Tableau users know Get the data → https://data.world/vizwiz/coffee-chain-2041-2023 Get a copy of the workbook → https://nlt.kit.com/multi-parameter Interact with the workbook below the video...

In this video, I show you how to resize marks (in this case circles) dependent on how many marks are in the view. For example, if all possible marks are in the view (100%), the circles should be small. If only 10% of possible marks are in the view, the circles should be large.

I show how to do this on a map, but it can be extended to scatter plots, box plots, dot plots, jittered bar chart, and more.

This is the final installment of Makeover Monday as a community project and I decided to go back to the very first week of Makeover Monday in 2016 to use as our viz to makeover this week. It's looking at a complicated stat in baseball called Wins Above Replacement, which is basically a measure of how good a player is that an average player that would replace him.

A quadrant chart, by definition, is a scatter plot with a background split into four equal sections. Typically, though, the sections are divided up as to how they compare to the average of both axes. 

Before parameter actions, we've never been able to use Measure Names in a calculation. This week, I show you how to make a dynamic scatterplot and dynamic line chart by leveraging the power of parameter actions to pass the Measure Names field to a parameter, and thus a calculation.

Thank you to Hesham Eissa and Sara Hamdoun of The Data School for coming up with the solution.

Parameter actions are as powerful feature in Tableau. In this tip, I show you how you can update a parameter with the Measure Names field. In that past, you could never use Measure Names in a calculation, but parameters are now an exception because of parameter actions.

CONFESSION: I have been avoiding using set actions because I've struggled to wrap my head around getting them to work the way I think they should work.

Fortunately, we're surrounded by brilliant people at The Data School, so today Coach Carl asked Harry Cooney from DS11 (graduating tomorrow) to run a lesson for the team. Harry clearly understand them and walked us through several practical use cases to help us understand the basics. He then assigned each of us the task of recreating one of the vizzes from Lindsey Poulter's amazing resource of Set Action use cases. I was tasked with recreating her dynamic reference lines and colors viz.

I took on this challenge as I would a Workout Wednesday:

1. Understand the requirements
2. Play with the viz to see what it's doing
3. Rebuild the viz
4. Don't look at the method for the original until I'm done

I haven't been keeping up with as many Workout Wednesday's this year as I would like to, but when I saw some comments about the week 38 challenge, I thought it would be one I could get done quickly. The challenge comes from Ann Jackson and the idea is to build a dashboard where the users can pick and choose what they see. This is such a practical use case for anyone building dashboards.

From Ann:

One of my absolute favorite things about Tableau is that not only is it a fantastic data display tool, but it is amazing at data exploration and discovery.  While you’re in the flow of analysis there are tons of built in features that provide you feedback, awareness, and insight into your data.  Everything from displaying the number of marks on a sheet in the lower left corner (along with the sum of a measure) to exposing the worksheet summary card.  You can customize it to show you so many options and it’s one of the first tools I use when getting hands on with new data.

I thoroughly enjoyed this challenge and will use it going forward as a challenge in the Data School. Click on the image below for the interactive version.

For week 5, I sent Luke and Rody a little challenge to see if they thought it was worthy of a WW. It all started with a question from a customer on Convo, which led me to creating this view, which led to it showing up on WW.

The requirements are simple:

1. Allow the user to pick a starting month.
2. Allow the user to filter the years.
3. Based on the starting month, group the next 6 months into two quarters.
4. Display the remaining months as individual months.
5. Color the Quarters separately from the months.
6. You can used table calcs or LODs.
7. The quarters must appear in the correct order within the months based on each quarter's starting month.

For Workout Wednesday week 7, I challenge you to build this dynamic trellis chart. Special thanks to Chris Love for explaining to me why the trellis works the way it does. He has a great blog post series over on The Information Lab blog.

In this example, I'm using the same Superstore Sales I've used in previous Workout Wednesdays. Here are the guidelines:

1. Match my colors.
2. The user should be able to choose the level of detail they want for the date.
3. The date axis format should not change, irrespective of the date level chosen.
4. The user should be able to pick from the list of dimensions shown.
5. The dimensions should be sorted from upper left to lower right based on the sales in the most recent time period.
6. Match my tooltips. Note that they change based on the options the user selects. Pay attention to the date formats in particular.
7. The title should update dynamically based on the date level and dimension selected.
8. The end of each line should be labeled to the right of the last point. 
9. There should be a little circle on the end of each line.
10. Each section of the trellis should include a label for the value of the dimension for that section. E.g., California should be on the upper left when you selected quarters by state.
11. The dimension labels should be centered in each section.
12. There should be no gridlines, but the zero line should be included.
13. Each row should should have a light divider between them.
14. My final view is 900x700.

This week is a double tip. First, I take you through adding a buffer to the end of sparklines so that you can have your labels next to the end of the lines. Second, I show you how to create a dynamic date selector, which I then use to create a dynamic buffer for the labels.

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Parameters are one of Tableau’s most powerful features. I remember when they were first introduced and it completely changed the Tableau paradigm. This week’s video takes you through 12 simple use cases for parameters. These 12 barely scratch the surface for what’s possible.

NOTE: This video is 50 minutes long.

Monday I showed how to embed an image of a Tableau Dashboard in PowerPoint that updates dynamically.

This process can actually have a much broader use if you customize the URL to include filters.  Let’s look at an example.

Assume you’ve created this sales dashboard.

Notice that there are a few filter options on the right. Your goal is to build a PowerPoint for your regional sales teams, but you don’t want them to see each other’s information. You have a couple of options:

1. Create a separate dashboard for each region. Terrible idea! Way too many charts to maintain.
2. Add user level security. This is easy to do with Tableau Server, but there are lots of companies that can’t afford Tableau Server. So that option could be out the window.
3. Create filtered URLs and embed those in the PowerPoint via the instructions from Monday.

The link for the image for the whole dashboard is https://[YourTableauServerURL]/views/OneMinuteDashboard/OneMinuteDashboard.png.  And the resulting image looks like this:


If you want a page for the Central team, you simply add ?Region=Central to the end of the URL if you are using Tableau Server. The URL now looks like this:

https://[YourTableauServerURL]/views/OneMinuteDashboard/OneMinuteDashboard.png&Region=Central



Notice how the Region is filtered to Central.  You could embed this into PowerPoint, then duplicate the PowerPoint file and change to image to the East, etc.


You can include as many filters as you want by adding an ampersand (&) then whatever else you want to filter.  The filter has to be in the format filter_name=value.

If I want a page for each Order Priority for Central, then all I do is add &Order Priority=Critical to the URL.  Then replace this with High, then Medium, etc.  In this example, the URL would now look like this:

https:/[YourTableauServerURL]/views/OneMinuteDashboard/OneMinuteDashboard&Region=Central&Order%20Priority=Critical

And the resulting image looks like this:


Do you need to show the quick filters using this technique?  No, but for me it makes the image more clear to the reader to do so.  You could remove the quick filters and have the title update based on the filters.  That would look good.

Finally, if you want to include multiple selections from a filter, perhaps Critical and High, then you simply add ,High to the URL.

https://[YourTableauServerURL]/views/OneMinuteDashboard/OneMinuteDashboard.png?Region=Central&Order%20Priority=Critical,High

The image now looks like this:


The filtering options are pretty endless.  All you need to remember is the format for adding a filter to a URL:

?filter_name=value

I’ve created a PowerPoint with a page for each region here.

A common question I get, and I’m sure you do too, is “How can I get my Tableau Dashboard into a PowerPoint presentation?”  This question has a couple of solutions.

1. If you want a “live” Tableau dashboard in PowerPoint, see this blog post.
2. If you want to embed the “latest snapshot” of a dashboard, i.e., an image that updates automatically, then continue reading.

The URL to your dashboard will have a link similar to this: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/ArsenalPerformance/TheDominanceofRVP

All you have to do to get an image of the dashboard is to add “.png” to the end of the URL.  My URL now looks like: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/ArsenalPerformance/TheDominanceofRVP.png and here’s the resulting image.

This is a nice static snapshot, but your user, let’s see she’s a saleswoman, wants this in PowerPoint (she doesn’t want to have to go to Tableau Server) and she wants PowerPoint to always reflect the latest data.  An example might be a sales report that you published on Tableau Server that refreshes weekly on Sunday night.  The saleswoman wants to open PowerPoint every Monday and have it reflect the latest data.

Here’s how you do it (Windows only):

Step 1 – From the PowerPoint ribbon, choose Insert –> Image.

Step 2 – Paste the link to the image in the File name box and click the triangle next to the Open button.

Step 3 – The Open button might gray out for a few seconds while the image is retrieved and you may be prompted to login to Tableau Server.  Go ahead and do so.

Step 4 – Choose Insert and Link when the menu appears.

That’s it!  You now have an embedded, dynamically updating image from your Tableau Server inside PowerPoint.  Of course, you now need to save the PowerPoint file.

When your saleswoman opens the PowerPoint file, she’ll be prompted with a security warning.  She needs to choose Enable Content.

Another security warning may appear, and she should choose Yes at this message.  She should NOT check the “Do not ask me…” message because that setting extends beyond this specific file.

The image now reflects the latest data on Tableau Server.  Try it yourself by opening the PPT file used for this blog post here.

Reminder: This works for Windows only.  PowerPoint on Mac does not have the same embed functionality (that I could find).  Also, when you open the PPT file on a Mac, your are not given the prompt to Enable External Images and the image will not update dynamically.

If anyone knows how to do this in PowerPoint on a Mac, please let me know.  That’s really what I need.

Situation: You have daily sales data, but you don’t want to include the current week until it closes.  You also don’t want to manually filter the most recent week out of the report each week because that’s an unnecessary nuisance.

Solution: Create two date calculations and one filter calculation

Step 1 – Create a calculated field to get the current year & week

Note that I’m creating a string that includes the year.  This is necessary if you have more than one year in your reports.  If the formula only returns the week number, then that week number would be excluded for all years.

Step 2 – Create a calculated field to get the year & week for each date of your date field

Step 3 – Create a calculated field to act as the filter

Step 4 – Drag the Exclude Current Week field to the Filters shelf and choose the Exclude option on the bottom right when the result of the calculation is “EXCLUDE”

An alternative solution would be to build the two calculated field from step 1 & 2 into the calculation built in step 3, but I chose to break them out separately for this example so that you can more easily see how the calculations work together.

The calculation would look like this:

This method would work if you wanted to ONLY KEEP the current week.  In this case, you would follow step 4, but you would NOT select the Exclude checkbox on the bottom right.

Here’s the situation: You have multiple measures that you want to view across time, but you don’t want to see all of the measures at the same time. Instead you want the user to be able to pick the measure to view.

Parameters to the rescue!

Andy Cotgreave blogged about user built views in his Data Studio days. In this blog post I will provide the step-by-step directions.  The charts types you can create with the technique are seemingly endless, but I’ll go through a simple scenario.

Step 1 – Right-click anywhere in the Measures or Dimensions windows and choose Create Parameter.  Create a parameter named “Choose a measure” with the settings below.  Note that I am giving this a name that will instruction the user as to what to do.

Step 2 – Find the parameter you just created in the Parameters window.  Right-click on it and choose “Create Calculated Field”.

Step 3 – Use a CASE statement to build the calculated field.  This field is telling Tableau what measure to use based on the value chosen in the “Choose a measure” parameter.

Step 4 – Add Order Date to the column shelf and your new “Measure chosen” measure to the row shelf. For this example, I’ve expanded the Order Date field to Quarter.

Notice how the y-axis is labeled “Measure chosen”.  We’ll clean that up in a bit.

Step 5 – Right-click on your “Choose a measure” parameter in the Parameter window and choose “Show Parameter Control”.  It should appear on the upper-right of the window. 

Make different selections in the parameter control and notice how the y-axis and the chart change dynamically.

Step 6 – Drag the “Choose a measure” parameter to the row shelf.  Again, make different selections in the parameter control and watch the label change.

We’re almost done.  Just a bit of formatting remains.

Step 7 – Clean up the chart.

1. Right-click on the field that shows the “Choose a measure” value and select “Rotate Label”
   
   
   
2. Right-click on the row label and choose “Hide Labels for Rows”.
   
   
   
3. Double-click on the “Measure Chosen” axis to bring up the Edit Axis window.  Delete the title.

That’s it.  You’re final viz should look like this:

If you’re like me, once you saw this technique, you began thinking of all of the possible uses.  Play around with lots of different use cases.  Try scatter plots, dual-axis charts, bubble charts, etc.  You can control ANY of the shelves using parameters.  Imagine the guided analysis you can provide your users and the exploration they’ll be able to do on their own.  It’s almost like creating a pivot table for them. 

If you want a slightly more complex version, I created a scatterplot of NBA franchise values that allows you pick the x-axis, y-axis and size, all with parameters.

Parameters are quite powerful.  Leverage them!

Download the sample workbook here.