Apply filters across sheets

- [Narrator] The way that filters work with dashboards are slightly different than how they work in individual sheets. There's a couple of key things we need to be aware of when we're using them. Now filters reduce the amount of data displayed. It's very rare that you're going to want to look at the entirety of your data set. So you're always, generally going to look at a subset, and filters are great for doing this. Now, if you have a filter displayed in a view, when you add that view to the dashboard, the filter also gets displayed because Tableau figures well, you had it open in the view, and in the separate sheet so chances are you'll want it in the dashboard. However, we can also add filters to the dashboard, if Tableau doesn't bring it across automatically because it's not present in the sheet. But they must belong to the sheet, even if they're not part of the current view. So when it comes to filters, there's two things to consider. Firstly, how do we make filters apply to some sheets but not others? And secondly, where should we place those filters? So, let's build a quick dashboard using our data set. So, I'm going to bring across my map, and we'll bring across our weekly categories, our regional profits, and then maybe our customer sales. Now we can see I've got my four sheets, but on the right-hand side, I've got this container that has all of these different filters. Now, I didn't tell Tableau to pull those in, so why did it? Well, if we go and look at, say, the Profit Map sheet, we can see on the right-hand side we have these two elements that are part of the view. We have the state and the order date filter control. Now, because that's part of the sheet, Tableau's incorporated that into the dashboard when I pull that sheet across. Similarly, if I look at the Weekly Category Profit, I've got a filter control for the order date. So, if we go back to the dashboard, we can then see how these affect the rest of the sheet. Now, it might be that for our dashboard, I don't actually want that state filter because that was only when I was building the profit map to make sure it worked okay. So, if you want to remove a filter, it's as simple as selecting the filter and clicking on the cross to remove it from the dashboard. Now, it's important to realize that that filter hasn't been removed from the workbook entirely. It still exists within the profit map. So, if you'd made any changes to that filter control before you deleted it, that's still going to be in place. It has not removed the filter, just the control. The next issue we've got is we've got three filters that all look identical because each of my sheets had an order date filter control as part of the view. So, which one applies to which sheet? We don't know. We could find out by selecting one and changing the value and seeing which sheet changed. But, it might not be the case that it actually is visible. Now, one way we can get around having multiples sheets and multiple filters is to make them apply to more than one single sheet. So, for example, if I go back to my profit map, I have my order date here. It might be that I want to look at only the last three years for all of my sheets. So what I can do is I can show the filter control. I set it to be the appropriate date range that I want. And then on the filter shelf, I can click apply to worksheets. Then I have some options. If I want it to apply across every sheet within the data source, I can select all using this data source, and the icon changes to the data source icon to indicate that this is now applied across every single worksheet. Now, if I go back I can see that that same filter is now being applied to both my timeline and my regional profits. Now what this means is now effectively, these three controls are all duplicates. So I can remove two of them, and now I know that this one single control will change everything. So if I change to look at the last two years, we can see all of the sheets update to reflect that. So what about a filter that wasn't part of the import of the sheet? Have a look at our profit map. We want to bring in a segment as a universal filter across our entire dashboard. So to do that, I add it to the filter shelf, I select all the options and click okay, and then I'll make this a global filter to apply to all of the worksheets in the data source. If I go back to my dashboard, it hasn't appeared because I've not told Tableau that I want to make use of it. In order to put in a filter from a specific sheet we have to click on the sheet, go to analysis, go down to filters, and then click the name of the filter that you want to bring in, in this case segment. Now I have my segment filter here and I can see that if I change any of these all four of my sheets will update to reflect that filter.