If you are new to Tableau you may have seen KPI or BANs at the top of a dashboard. This is considered a best practice by Tableau's eye tracking study here. But what about taking that design a step further and using them to filter the rest of the dashboard!
You may have seen dashboards such as the one below by Priya Padham where you can use buttons to switch the measure for the different charts.
Superstore Dashboard example with Sales button selected
Dashboard with Profit button selected
Zak Geis has a Customer Complaints dashboard here where you can click on the different KPI's and it will filter the rest of the dashboard! Check out the video below:
Murilo Cremon has an interesting Help Desk dashboard using Mark Bradbourne's Real World Fake Datasets where you can select the dots in the upper right hand corner of the KPI here. Selecting a dot will change the metrics in the dashboard!
Displaying Tickets KPI selected
Seffana Mohamed - Ajaz has a dashboard where you can select the side bar and it will filter the rest of the dashboard. She had the help of a highlight trick to color the background here.
Displaying Invite Sent
Displaying Engaged KPI
I also found this dashboard called PMO - Project Management Dashboard RWFD Exchange by Ajay Varghese which also used a highlighting trick for the background KPI color.
The element I found in common with all five dashboards was that they used Parameter Actions!
In the next three weeks I will walk you through how to create these KPI tricks! Each week will be a new tip!