Our Certified Tableau Trainers are asked a myriad of questions each day. In this series, they share some answers.

A common question that comes up trainings is:

”What does the small grey bar within the quick filter box represent?”

Using quick filters is one of the easiest ways to provide end users with the ability to control what they want to see. Although they are quick, they are not always recommended when optimizing your reports. See The Tableau Performance Checklist for more info. But when quick filters are used, why is there sometimes a small grey bar within the range of values?

Let’s look at a sample report with a quick filter on sales:

In this example, the small grey bar represents the value $223,844, which is the largest sum of sales value displayed in the visualization. It shows how far I can reduce the upper sum of sales limit until the largest sum of sales sub-category is removed. As I move the right slider past the small grey bar, the visualization is re-rendered once I stopped at $132,235:

The view now shows only nine sub-categories with the highest sum of sales value being $114,880. The small grey bar still exists, but this time represents the $114,880 value. Once again, this value marks the distance the slide can be reduced to until the next sub-category will be removed.