Great dashboards engage users and encourage exploration and discovery. A great way to do this is using interactivity. Let’s look into how to achieve this with different BI tools. 

Interactivity in Tableau    

In Tableau this can be achieved with dashboard actions. There are a number of actions we can use, with the most commonly used being highlight and action filters.  

In Tableau, there is the option to add filters from the sheets on a dashboard. With a sheet selected, the “Use as Filter” option will be shown on the shortcut menu:

This will add a filter action using the fields on the view to filter all other sheets in a dashboard: 

The same can also be achieved using the action menu under the menu option Dashboard -> Actions:

From this menu, we have a number of options. Let’s focus on highlight and filter action. 

Highlight actions will, as the name suggests, highlight the data points from one chart that are also shown in another. No data is removed from the visulisations — instead the other data points are shaded out with the selection data shown in full colour. The only limitation here is that the charts in question need to have the same dimensions in the view that are being used to drive the action. For example: If we are selecting a category on one chart, that category also needs to be on the second chart in order to achieve the highlight action.  

Filter actions filter other charts based on selected data points, removing them from the view completely.    

So, What About Interactivity in Power BI? 

In Power BI, this is called “visual interactions,” and will be added by default to your dashboard. I really like this feature as the highlight shows the proportion of the selected values against the backdrop of the full dataset. This differs from Tableau which will only highlight whole marks.  

Okay, great! But what customisation can be done here? What if we don’t want an interaction to apply? Or what if, instead of a highlight effect, we would like to filter? 

Well, we can adjust these settings.  Select the chart you wish to adjust, then navigate to the Format banner, and in the top menu there will be the “Edit Interactions” button.  

This will expose three small icons on each chart in your dashboard, these allow us to control whether interactions are applied to that visual. For each chart (the ones we have not selected), we can define whether the selected visualisation will highlight, filter or do nothing. The dimensions in the view will be used to apply the filter or highlight, unlike in Tableau where we do not specify source or target fields:

What About URL Actions? 

Tableau has URL actions which allow us to pass a field from a sheet to a URL string and either open the link in a web browser or show a web page in an embedded object in a dashboard. Read more about these two options for URL actions here.   

In PowerBI there is the ability to add URL hyperlinks to tables and matrices. To do this, set the column category type to be URL, and this will then be picked up automatically in table and matrix visualisations. We can also create URL buttons or navigate from images on the dashboard. To do this go to the “Insert” tab and then hit the “add a button or image” option. We can format this, toggle on actions and use the “Web URL” option from the dropdown:

Drilling Up and Down

Drilling up and down to different levels of data in a chart can be really powerful and allows the end user to focus in on data points that are relevant. In Tableau, this can be done by creating a hierarchy in the data pane and using the “+” and “–” icons that then appear on our charts. The alternative way to do this would be to use a parameter — this approach is a bit more involved, but is detailed in this blog.  

In Power BI, we can control how the end user drills up and down in charts using these up and down arrow buttons, which will be shown when the data in the visualization allows:

When Drill Mode is switched on using the second button from the left, the end user can select a data point and the visual updates to show the next level of detail. The next two drill down options expose all values within the hierarchy and show the values nested below the higher level:

 As you can see there are lots of options for building interactivity into your work. If you want more support in building great dashboards, then please don’t hesitate to reach out!