How to Add Filter to Tableau Dashboard

Adding a filter to your Tableau dashboard turns a static report into an interactive and exploratory tool. Instead of just presenting data, filters empower your audience to ask their own questions, narrow down the results, and uncover the specific insights they care about most. This article will walk you through the essential ways to add and customize filters in your Tableau dashboards, from basic controls to more dynamic actions.

What Are Tableau Filters and Why Do They Matter?

At its core, a filter in Tableau is a way to include or exclude data from your view. Think of your sales data for the last five years. A filter allows a user to instantly zoom in on a specific year, a single product category, or a particular region without you having to build a separate report for each one. This makes your dashboards incredibly efficient and user-friendly, putting the power of analysis directly into the hands of your audience.

Tableau operates with what’s known as an "order of operations," which dictates the sequence in which filters are applied. Understanding this hierarchy helps you diagnose why your dashboard might behave in an unexpected way:

• Extract Filters: Applied before data is even brought into Tableau. This is done when you create an extract (a saved subset) of your data source.
• Data Source Filters: Applied to the entire data source before it populates any of your worksheets.
• Context Filters: These are powerful filters that create a temporary, smaller dataset which all other filters operate on. For example, filtering for "US Sales" first as a context filter means subsequent Region and State filters will only ever see US data.
• Dimension Filters: The most common type. These filter discrete categorical data like country, product name, or department.
• Measure Filters: These filter your continuous numerical data, such as sales figures, profit margins, or website sessions (e.g., show only sales greater than $10,000).

For today, we're focusing on Dimension Filters, as they are the most frequently used for creating interactive dashboard controls.

Adding a Basic Filter From a Worksheet

The most straightforward way to add a filter to your dashboard is by first adding it to an individual worksheet and then exposing that filter on the dashboard itself. Let's walk through it with a simple example: a dashboard showing sales by region.

Step 1: Create the Filter on the Worksheet

First, navigate to the specific worksheet that contains the chart or table you want to filter (e.g., a map showing sales by state).

1. On the left-side Data pane, find the dimension you want to use as a filter. For our example, let's use 'Region'.
2. Drag the 'Region' dimension and drop it onto the 'Filters' card, located just below the 'Marks' card.
3. A dialog box will pop up. This box shows you all the possible values for that dimension (e.g., Central, East, South, West). You can select which ones to include by default. For now, just click the "All" button at the top and then click OK.

You’ve now technically filtered the view, though it looks the same since you included everything. The important part is that the filter is now active on this worksheet.

Step 2: Show the Filter on Your Dashboard

Once the worksheet is on your dashboard, you can make its filter visible for users to interact with.

1. Navigate to your dashboard tab. Make sure the worksheet you just edited ('Map of Sales', for instance) is already on your dashboard canvas.
2. Click on the container for that worksheet so that a gray border appears around it.
3. In the top right corner of the selected container, click the small downward-pointing arrow (the 'More Options' caret).
4. In the dropdown menu, hover over 'Filters'. A sub-menu will appear showing all available filters from that worksheet.
5. Click on the filter you just created, in this case, 'Region'.

A new floating card for the 'Region' filter will appear on your dashboard! By default, it will likely show as a multi-select list with checkboxes. Now anyone viewing the dashboard can check or uncheck regions to filter the map in real-time.

Customizing Your Dashboard Filter

A simple list of checkboxes is great, but Tableau offers many ways to display your filter so it perfectly matches your dashboard's design and function.

To customize your filter, find the filter card on your dashboard, click its 'More Options' caret (the dropdown arrow on its own title bar), and you'll see a list of display options. The most useful ones are:

• Single Value (List): Displays values as radio buttons, allowing the user to select only one option at a time. Ideal for when you want the user to focus on a single category, like looking at one salesperson’s performance.
• Single Value (Dropdown): The same as a list but packed into a space-saving dropdown menu. Perfect for crowded dashboards or when you have many options.
• Multiple Values (List): The default option. It shows all values with checkboxes, allowing users to select any combination of options for comparison.
• Multiple Values (Dropdown): A compact version of the multi-select list, allowing users to quickly select or deselect multiple options within a dropdown menu.
• Single Value (Slider): Best for ordered data like dates or rating scales (1-5). It allows the user to slide through options sequentially.
• Wildcard Match: A text input field where a user can type to search for values (e.g., typing "Tech*" to find all products starting with "Tech").

Within the filter's 'Customize' menu (in that same dropdown), you can toggle settings like 'Show "All" Value' and 'Show Apply Button'. The 'Apply Button' is particularly useful on complex dashboards, as it prevents the dashboard from refreshing after every single click in the filter. Instead, users make all their selections first and then click 'Apply' to see the changes.

Applying One Filter to Multiple Worksheets

This is where your dashboard starts to feel connected and highly interactive. By default, a filter you add only affects the worksheet it originally came from. If your dashboard has a map, a bar chart, and a sales summary table, you'll want your 'Region' filter to control all three. Here’s how.

1. On the dashboard, find the filter card you want to apply more broadly.
2. Click the 'More Options' arrow on the filter card.
3. Hover your mouse over 'Apply to Worksheets'.
4. You have three main choices here:

To continue our example, you would choose 'Selected Worksheets...', then check the boxes next to your map, your bar chart, and your summary table. Now, when a user selects 'East' in the region filter, all three components of the dashboard will update simultaneously to show only East region data.

Creating Dynamic Filters with Dashboard Actions

Instead of relying on filter cards, you can turn your actual charts into interactive filters. For example, a user could click a specific state on your map, and the rest of the dashboard would automatically filter to show data just for that state. This is done with Dashboard Actions.

Step 1: Set Up the Action

1. From your dashboard view, go to the top menu bar and click 'Dashboard > Actions...'.
2. In the popup Actions window, click the 'Add Action' button at the bottom and select 'Filter...'.

Step 2: Configure the Filter Action

A new configuration window will appear. Here's how to set it up:

• Name: Give your action a clear, descriptive name. For example, "Filter by Clicking Map".
• Source Sheets: Check the box for the worksheet that will initiate the filter. In this case, it would be your map visualization ('Map of Sales').
• Run action on: Choose how users interact with the source sheet.
• Target Sheets: Check the boxes for the worksheets you want to be filtered when the action runs (e.g., your bar chart and summary table).
• Clearing the selection will: Decide what happens when the user clicks off the selected mark on your map.

After you click OK, your action is live. Go back to your dashboard and test it out. Click a state on your map. The bar chart and summary table should instantly update to reflect your selection. Click on the white space in the map, and they should revert to showing the complete dataset. This creates a much more organic and exploratory feel for the end-user.

Final Thoughts

Learning to add and manage filters is the key to creating responsive, powerful, and truly useful Tableau dashboards. Whether you use simple filter cards applied to multiple worksheets or create dynamic click-through experiences with dashboard actions, these techniques help you build analytical tools instead of just static reports.

Creating intuitive, interactive dashboards this way is a game-changer, but it often involves a steep learning curve and constant tweaking. We believe getting insights from your data shouldn’t require you to become an expert in complex BI software. With Graphed we’ve made the process as simple as having a conversation. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources and instantly create live dashboards just by describing what you want to see - no need to drag and drop or configure filter actions manually.