Member-only story
Tableau Context Filters In Action
Context filters in Tableau are very useful, and if you are not using them yet, you probably need to go back and test your dashboards again :)
In this tutorial, we are going to go over how context filters work through a step-by-step guided exercise. We will be using the “Sample - Superstore” dataset that comes pre-loaded with every Tableau installation.
By default, Tableau filters are computed independently. That means, each filter will try to access all the rows of your data, regardless of what other filters you have on. And what is shown in the final view, is where all of those filters intersect each other. Context filters change that behavior.
Suppose your task is to find the top 3 product sub-categories for a certain manufacturer. If you create a top 3 filter on Tableau and then try to select the manufacturer, Tableau will only return the sub-categories that were already part of the top 3 filter without recomputing the top sub-categories for the selected manufacturer. So if that selected manufacturer only belonged to 2 of those top 3, your results will only include 2 sub-categories. So, how to force Tableau to process the data that passes through the context filter, ie: recompute the top 3 sub-categories for the selected manufacturer.
