How to Use Parameter actions in Tableau

How to use parameter actions in Tableau let’s go over to desktop and take a look

Okay parameter actions in Tableau I have a dashboard built with a simple bar chart I’m going to show you how to use a dashboard action let’s go over to the sheet it’s a bar chart by region and percentage of total my goal here with the parameter action is to color One of These Bars based on a selection I’m going to start by creating a parameter I’m going to click on the region drop down

Create parameter

The default is fine the user can select between East Central South and West click ok let’s show my parameter and I’m defaulted on East I’m going to write a simple true or false calculation to test if the region and let me show header so we can see it if the region equals East so this uh Mark here East bar needs to be colored I’m going to create a calculated field it’s a very simple calculation region equals region parameter yes or no true or false I’m just gonna call this color

Click apply and okay i’ll drag my color pill over to color of course and I see that East is now highlighted in Orange and false is blue of course if I change from east to North North is going to be colored Orange go back to my dashboard

And I’m going to add a parameter action so I want the user to be able to click on one of these bars and color it orange maybe they’re telling a story about something that’s going on on the screen and they want to dynamically tell the story I’m going to click on dashboard actions

This sheet only click add action change parameter

Uh we can name this we can name this color bars

And I want uh the action to be run on select and I want it to be run on my

Bar by region and i’ll run it on both

So I’m going to run it on this sheet which is quantity bar by region my Target brand parameter is the parameter that I just created called region parameter and i’ll explain what this what is happening after I set the parameters here my source field is going to be region and I don’t want an aggregation clearing the selection will keep the current value so just reading this as a sentence I want when the bar by region is selected the region field to be passed into the region parameter and when you clear the selection it keeps the last selection click ok and okay one more time now when I select bars here Select East my parameter becomes East and East is Orange Let’s select South South is now Orange so that’s one example of how to use parameter action