Filters — The Tableau Student Guide

Let’s introduce another integral part of the fun stuff that Tableau can do: filters!

Tableau has a pretty easy filtering system, and it even allows the filters to be placed within the view so the client themselves can click what they want to see. Let’s go back to our bar chart and filter it by Segment.

- Right click Segment and “Show Filter”

Here we now have the option to click what Segments we want to see, and don’t want to see.

We can also edit the type of filter we want, using the dropdown menu on the filter.

We can also use filters for measures. Let’s say you’re making this dashboard about profits, but you don’t know what your client thinks is a good “profit threshold”. You can add profit to the filter, and it will allow them to choose a slider to manually see what is costing or making them money.

- Right click Profit and choose “Show Filter”

It’s important to notice here that since both Segment and Profit are being filtered, they filter on each other. If you filter Segment to just see Consumer, then your profit filter will only correspond to the profits in the Consumer segment, and vice versa.

Now here with the superstore dataset, we don’t have many sub-categories that it’s very necessary to filter, but you may run into a data set that is huge. Let’s examine a case where using a filter can clearly be a good policy.

Let’s build a bar chart that shows us the sum of sales per customer, along with seeing profit on color.

- Place sales on Columns, Customer Name on Rows, and Profit on the Color mark. Sort Descending.

Notice how many customer names we have. We have to scroll a lot, and we can’t grab quick insights. If we wanted to see all the customers that are losing profit, we would have to scroll and count it manually. Here is where the filter will come in handy!

- Right click Profit and “Show Filter”

- Drag the Profit filter slider to be between -$6,626 and $0.

Here we can quickly and easily choose the range of profit that we want to see.

For a great exercise in filtering, check out Mark Bradbourne’s “Escape Room” viz here.