How to Create Navigation Buttons in Tableau Dashboard

Creating beautiful, data-rich dashboards in Tableau is one thing, but making them easy for your audience to use is another. One of the best ways to improve the user experience is by adding clear navigation buttons, which allow users to seamlessly switch between different dashboards or views within the same workbook. This article walks you through a few different ways to create navigation buttons in Tableau, from the simple drag-and-drop method to a more advanced, customized approach.

Why Bother With Navigation Buttons?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." As your analyses become more complex, you might find yourself building multiple dashboards to tell a complete story. For example, you might have one dashboard for a high-level sales overview, another for a deep dive on marketing campaign performance, and a third for website traffic analysis.

Without navigation buttons, your users are left to click through the small tabs at the bottom or top of the workbook. This isn't just clumsy, it can also be confusing for less experienced users who might not even know the other dashboards exist. A well-designed navigation bar accomplishes a few important things:

• Improves User Experience (UX): It provides a clear, intuitive path for users to follow, much like the navigation bar on a website.
• Creates a Professional Feel: Custom buttons make your workbook feel less like a collection of sheets and more like a polished, cohesive application or report.
• Guides the Narrative: You can arrange buttons in a specific order to guide your user through a data story, starting with a broad overview and moving to more granular details.

Method 1: The Quick and Easy Way with Tableau's Navigation Object

Tableau provides a built-in "Navigation" object that's perfect for quickly adding buttons to a dashboard. This is the fastest and most straightforward method, ideal for when you just need a functional button without too much custom styling.

Let's assume you have two dashboards already built in your workbook: a "Sales Overview" dashboard and a "Marketing Performance" dashboard. Your goal is to add a button on the Sales Overview that leads to Marketing Performance.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Open Your Dashboard: Go to the dashboard where you want to add the button (in our example, the "Sales Overview" dash).
2. Find the Navigation Object: In the Dashboard pane on the left, under the "Objects" section, find the Navigation object. If you don’t see it, make sure the "Floating" option is not selected, or vice versa, depending on where you'd like to place it initially. Drag this object onto your dashboard canvas.
3. Configure the Button: As soon as you drop the Navigation object onto the canvas, a configuration dialog box will appear. Here's what the options mean:

For this example, let's stick with a Text Button. For the Title, type "View Marketing Dashboard." Choose a background color that stands out and configure the font as you see fit.

1. Test Your Button: In Tableau Desktop, you need to hold down the ALT key (or Option key on a Mac) while clicking to test navigation buttons. Click your new button, and it should immediately take you to the "Marketing Performance" dashboard. If it works, you're all set! Just remember to add a similar button on the second dashboard so users can get back.

This method is fantastic for its simplicity. However, its main limitation is the lack of dynamic styling. You can't, for example, easily change the button's appearance to indicate which dashboard is currently active. For that, we need a more custom approach.

Method 2: Building Custom Navigation with Worksheet Actions

For complete control over the look and feel of your navigation buttons, you can build them using individual worksheets and then wire them up with Dashboard Actions. This method allows for unique styling, custom shapes, and advanced features like highlighting the active button.

Let's completely rebuild our navigation bar a different way. The goal is to create two distinct buttons - "Sales" and "Marketing" - that can be placed at the top of both dashboards.

Part 1: Creating the Button Worksheets

First, we need to create a unique worksheet for each navigation button.

• Create "Sales Button" Sheet:
• Create "Marketing Button" Sheet:

Now you should have two separate worksheets that visually look like clickable buttons.

Part 2: Assembling the Navigation Bar on the Dashboard

1. Go back to your primary dashboard, "Sales Overview".
2. Drag a Horizontal Container object to the top of your dashboard. This will hold our buttons neatly.
3. Drag your two button worksheets ("BTN: Sales" and "BTN: Marketing") into this horizontal container. Remove the titles and fit them to "Entire View" to make them fill the space.
4. Your buttons are on the dashboard, but they don't do anything yet. Now, let's add the magic with actions.

Part 3: Configuring the Dashboard Actions

1. With your "Sales Overview" dashboard active, go to the top menu and select Dashboard > Actions…
2. In the Actions window, click Add Action > Go to Sheet…. This action tells Tableau to navigate to another sheet when an event happens.
3. A configuration window will appear. Fill it out as follows to create the action for the marketing button:
4. Now, back in the Actions list, repeat the process for your other button. Create another "Go to Sheet" action to navigate back from the "Marketing Performance" dashboard to the "Sales Overview" dashboard when the "BTN: Sales" sheet is clicked.

After setting up actions for all buttons on all dashboards, leave the Actions menu and test it out (again, using ALT key + click in Desktop). Your custom worksheets now function just like the built-in Navigation object, but with one key difference: you have full control over their design.

Leveling Up: Highlighting the Active Dashboard Button

This worksheet method really shines when you want to give the user visual feedback about their current location. Let's make the active dashboard's button a different color.

This advanced trick uses a combination of sheet swapping and actions to work. The basic idea is that for each dashboard ("Sales" and "Marketing"), we'll have two versions of its button - one for the 'active' state (dark gray) and one for the 'inactive' state (light gray) - and show only the relevant ones.

This is a much more complex approach. Instead of two visual states, an easier but still very effective approach is to leverage parameters.

1. Create a Parameter: First, create a parameter. Let's call it "p_ActiveDashboard".
2. Link the Button Color to the Parameter:
3. Create a Parameter Action:

Now, when a user clicks on the "Marketing" button, two things happen simultaneously: the "Go to Sheet" action navigates them to the marketing dashboard, and the "Change Parameter" action updates our parameter's value to "Marketing." This instantly triggers the color calculation on both button sheets, making the marketing button dark (active) and the sales one light (inactive). You've now created a fully dynamic and professional-looking navigation experience.

Final Thoughts

Being able to effectively guide users through your dashboards can significantly increase their utility and impact. By mastering both Tableau's simple Navigation object and the more flexible worksheet actions, you can choose the right method for any situation and turn a good dashboard into a great, highly usable data application.

If you're focused on getting to those dashboard insights faster without deep-diving into Tableau's configuration settings, that's where we come in. At Graphed , we streamline the process of creating multi-dashboard reports. Instead of building each view and action by hand, you can simply ask for what you need in plain English - like "create a sales dashboard showing revenue by region and a marketing dashboard for campaign ROI" - and our AI builds fully interactive, real-time dashboards for you in seconds. It connects your data and handles the visualization, letting you skip straight to the analysis.