How to Use Highlighting in Tableau Dashboards
Dragging your users through a static dashboard can feel like giving a tour of a house, but only letting them look through the windows. Highlighting in Tableau changes this by letting your audience step inside and explore the data for themselves. This article will walk you through exactly how to set up and use Tableau highlighting to make your dashboards more intuitive, interactive, and insightful.
What is Highlighting in Tableau?
Highlighting is an interactive feature that allows a user to select a data point (a mark) on one chart, and Tableau instantly emphasizes all related data points across other charts in the dashboard. Unrelated data points are not removed but are instead "dimmed" or faded into the background, providing crucial context without distracting from the main story.
Highlighting vs. Filtering: What's the Difference?
This is a common point of confusion for new Tableau users, but the distinction is simple and powerful:
- Filtering removes data from the view entirely. If you filter for the "Technology" category, all data from "Furniture" and "Office Supplies" disappears. The axes on your charts will rescale, and all your calculations will update to reflect only the filtered data. Filtering is about isolating a subset of your data.
- Highlighting preserves all the data in the view but visually separates a subset. If you highlight the "Technology" category, the marks for furniture and office supplies will dim, while technology data points shine through. The axes don’t change, and you can still see the highlighted data in the context of the entire dataset. Highlighting is about focusing attention while maintaining context.
Choosing between them depends on your goal. If you want to let users drill down into a specific segment, use a filter. If you want them to see how one segment compares to the whole, use a highlight.
How to Set Up a Highlight Action: A Step-by-Step Guide
The magic behind highlighting is a feature called a Highlight Action. Setting one up is straightforward. Let’s imagine we have a simple dashboard with two worksheets:
- A bar chart showing total Sales by Category.
- A scatter plot showing Sales vs. Profit by Sub-Category.
Our goal is to click on a category in the bar chart (like "Furniture") and have all the sub-categories belonging to "Furniture" light up in the scatter plot.
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Step 1: Open the Actions Menu
To create a highlight action, you first need to be on your dashboard page (not an individual worksheet). From the top menu bar, navigate to Dashboard > Actions.... This will open the Actions dialog box, a central hub for all interactivity on your dashboard.
Step 2: Add a Highlight Action
In the bottom-left corner of the Actions window, click the Add Action > button and select Highlight... from the dropdown menu. This will open the configuration window where you'll define how your highlight behaves.
Step 3: Configure the Highlight Action
This dialog box might look intimidating, but it breaks down into a few simple parts. Let’s configure it for our example.
1. Name
First, give your action a descriptive name. Tableau defaults to "Highlight1," which isn't very helpful if you have multiple actions. Change it to something like "Highlight - Category to Sub-Category." This makes it easier to manage your dashboard later.
2. Source Sheets
This section tells Tableau which worksheet will trigger the action. In our case, we want the interactivity to start when a user clicks the bar chart. So, check the box next to your bar chart worksheet (e.g., "Sales by Category") and uncheck everything else.
3. Target Sheets
This section tells Tableau which worksheet(s) should react to the action. We want our scatter plot to be highlighted. In this section, check the box for your scatter plot worksheet (e.g., "Sales vs. Profit"). The source sheet is automatically selected as a target, which means clicking a bar will also highlight that same bar. You can leave this as is.
4. Run Action On
Here you decide what user interaction triggers the highlight:
- Hover: The highlight activates just by moving the mouse over a mark. It's great for quick, fluid exploration but can sometimes feel "too busy" if the view is dense.
- Select: The highlight activates when the user clicks a mark. This is the most common option because it’s a clear, deliberate action.
- Menu: The highlight activates when a user hovers over a mark to bring up the tooltip, then selects a menu option. This is used for more specialized cases and less common for simple highlighting.
For our example, let's choose Select.
5. Target Highlighting
This final section is the most important - it tells Tableau how to match marks between the source and target sheets. You have two main options:
- All Fields: Tableau will try to match marks based on all the shared fields between the source and target sheets. This is fine for simple dashboards with very similar structures but can cause unexpected behavior in more complex views.
- Selected Fields: This gives you precise control. You tell Tableau exactly which field to use for the match.
Click on Selected Fields. A box will appear showing the fields available in your source sheet. In our bar chart, the key dimension is 'Category.' Select 'Category' from the list. Now, Tableau knows that when a user clicks a mark in the source sheet, it should find all marks in the target sheet with the same 'Category' value and highlight them.
Step 4: Test Your Action
Click OK twice to close both dialog boxes. Now, go back to your dashboard and click on one of the bars - for example, the "Technology" bar. You should see that bar become more prominent, while in the scatter plot, only the sub-categories belonging to Technology (like Phones, Machines, Copiers, and Accessories) are highlighted. Everything else is dimmed. To clear the highlight, simply click on the background of the bar chart.
That's it! You've successfully created an interactive highlight action.
Tips for Using Highlighting Effectively
Once you've mastered the basics, you can use these tips to build even more sophisticated and user-friendly dashboards.
1. Use Legends and Color Palettes for Highlighting
By default, your dashboard’s legends can also be used as highlighters. Clicking on an item in a color legend will highlight all marks associated with that item across every worksheet. This is an intuitive form of interactivity that requires zero setup. You can even encourage users to do this by adding a title to your legend like "Click a Region to Highlight."
2. Create a Dedicated "Selector" Sheet
Instead of relying on a primary chart to trigger the highlight, you can build a simple worksheet whose sole purpose is to act as an interactive control panel. For example, you could create a worksheet that cleanly lists the names of your product categories. Place this on the dashboard and set it up as your highlight action's source sheet. This can create a cleaner user interface that looks more like a custom menu or set of buttons.
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3. Combine Highlighting with Other Actions
Highlighting is powerful on its own but even better when layered with other actions. You could create a dashboard where:
- Hovering over a state on a map highlights its data in a trend chart (a quick-look highlight action).
- Then, clicking on that state filters a different worksheet to show a detailed data table for only that state (a drill-down filter action).
This multi-layered approach gives users different levels of detail based on their interaction, creating a rich analytical experience.
4. Watch for Performance Issues
While Tableau is generally fast, highlight actions can sometimes cause performance lags, especially on very complex dashboards with thousands of marks. If you notice a delay after setting up a highlight action on Hover, try switching it to Select. A click-based action is less taxing on the system than constantly calculating highlights as a user moves their mouse.
Final Thoughts
Mastering highlighting is a major step toward making dashboards that people love to use. It bridges the gap between passive viewing and active exploration, allowing your audience to find their own insights by seeing how different parts of your data story connect - all without losing the surrounding context. It's a simple feature that delivers a massive impact.
While setting up this kind of interactivity is a core skill for BI tools, we know the process can feel manual and time-consuming. At Graphed , we aim to eliminate that friction by making data analysis conversational. You simply connect your data sources, describe the visual you need in plain English - "show me sales vs profit for each sub-category, color-coded by category" - and our AI creates the fully interactive dashboards for you. We help you skip the configuration drudgery and get straight to the impactful, data-driven answers.
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