What is Dynamic Zone Visibility?
According to Tableau, with Dynamic Zone Visibility, you can hide or reveal zones (tiled or floating dashboard elements) based on the value of a field or parameter. As you interact, zones on your dashboard appear or disappear. The result is a dynamic dashboard that doesn’t compromise your desired layout. In this blog, I’ll show you how to interact with the new feature.
Sample
We are going to create the below dashboard with the use of this feature. The data is based on the Sample – Superstore.
There are 2 key points.
- Use the parameter to show/hide the tree map and line chart.
- Apply the parameter action to achieve the same function.
GIF 1. Sample
Steps to re-establish the dashboard
a) Create charts and arrange them in containers
The essence of this use case is to show one of the containers while hiding the others.
To achieve that, we need to put a big horizontal container to hold all the vertical containers.
Figure 1. Dashboard containers
b) Add parameter to switch charts
Figure 2. Parameter Configuration
c) Create a boolean calculated field
To be used for Dynamic Zone Visibility, a field or parameter must be:
- Boolean.
- Single value.
- Independent of the viz, meaning the field returns a constant value independent of the structure of the viz, such as a fixed level of detail (LOD) calculation.
This example relies on boolean calculated fields. Therefore, we need to create 3 calculated fields for revealing or hiding the charts.
Figure 3. The calculated field for controlling the visibility of Furniture treemaps & line charts
Figure 4. The calculated field for controlling the visibility of Office treemaps & line charts
Figure 5. The calculated field for controlling the visibility of Technology treemaps & line charts
d) Drop the calculated fields in the control visibility
Since we need to hide the vertical containers which contain Treemap and line chart, we need to select the vertical container and drop the corresponding calculated field in the control visibility.
In my case, the default value of the parameter is Technology, that’s the reason why the other containers are hidden.
Hint: If you want to select your sheet’s container, you can just double-click the top of the sheet.
GIF 2. Set visibility
e) Add parameter action
If we want to click the main sheet’s category to use dynamic zone visibility, we can add a parameter action to achieve that.
- Go to Dashboard and select Action.
- Select Add Action‘s Change Parameter.
- Fill out the form like the below screenshot.
Figure 6. Parameter Action Configuration
f) Finish
GIF 3. Final Dashboard
If there are any problems, please feel free to point them out. Besides, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will try my best to answer your questions about Tableau or Alteryx.