Thanks Jai, I can see the logic and that it 'should' work but oddly enough it didn't. It only affected the viz's on the dashboard to which the filter is applied, it didn't filter through the rest of the workbook.

To give an idea, I have one summary level dashboard made up of kpi's from Customer, Staff, Financial, Quality (its an HR finance report) idea being that a user selects North and everything filters; the user can then select a kpi of interest - it might be red or the figures might be extraordinarily high or low and they are then taken to the dashboard that controls the kpi.

Your target filter idea (above) works on the dashboard to which the filter is applied: so on summary each of the kpi's from the different sources do filter however, when moving through the rest of the dashboards, they are all not filtered.

Target sheets would be a brilliant idea but I can only select one dashboard / sheet whereas I actually need to select multiples/all.

I shall create a sanitised workbook and upload.

To Guest (18.10.11): Thank-you for your idea however in this instance this idea will not work as the workbook also needs to be 'broken-down' into resepctive areas with certain regions 'locked-off' from others (done using sets) to prevent users from one region from viewing data from another.

I wish that education was that simple.

The brief is simply that most users IT knowledge does not expand further than "being able to turn-on the internet" by which it is meant that they are able to open IE the idea being that they are presented with a simple-to-use and intuitive reporting system that requires no learning - clicking buttons and moving sliders to get what they want - dare I say it here but the (in my opinion) inferior Qlikview with its programmable buttons and links might just achieve this.

But this is Tableau (and the company did after all accept my proposal to deploy Tableau over other visual BI tools); I digress.

I did consider your suggestion of multiple action filters but unfortunately they too did not work; I think that the linking data might just be too disparate even for Tableau; I am in the process of developing a cleaner hierarchy to serve this purpose, but it would be great if we could get to the bottom of this if only to help others.

In the meantime, global filters are working at dashboard level but due to the number of data sources in use (even though they are all .tde's), they too are unable to transverse across the dashboards & data-sources.

As I said before, this might be too difficult to try to solve on the bb alone so I shall provide a santised version before this week is out.

In short, unfortunately, this idea did not work.

However, you are correct and this, is precisely what I was using with exactly the same thought and expectations as you but two days from roll-out, I found that this wasn't working as expected prompting the current method and this topic.

Richard, your idea is very similar to Jai's post of 03.11.11 however, this does appear to be working on at least some of the sheets; I have (what I thought to be a large workbook) a relatively small workbook at 85 sheets; once I have setup the filters, I shall provide the results to check if we have solved this.

I have now added an inordinate amount of targeted filters to get this to work and it does; I shall post sanitised versions as soon as possible (apologies for not doing so sooner, had a catastrophe with an OCZ SSD and the Sandforce bug on my mediacentre over the weekend which required a new hard-drive and full installation marathon but thats a story for another forum).

I was thinking that it would be far cleaner and faster to be able to target datasources for filtering instead of individual dashboards and sheets; whilst there is no actual option for this in the action filters dialogue, does anyone no of a way that this may be achieveed even by editing the xml direct - or is the a question for the "Wouldn't it be nice if..." board?

Slight change to this, moved away from action filters to instead use parameters and calculated fields which are far more cleaner and smoother and (despite me building full hierarchies for the data) can be used to target fields of differing names / data without the screen 'flashing' as data is changed (as it does when using targetted / multiple targetted filters); which also has the effect of reducing cpu/memory overheads (as the data changes dynamically in the background).

Use parameters and calculated fields as filters; in my case I used:

Parameter name: Select Region

CF:

IF [Select Region] = 'All' THEN 1

ELSEIF [Select Region] = [region] THEN 1

ELSE 0

END

Apply the filter selecting 1 [to be shown] then on the dashboard simply show the parameter. Done.

This is working for 5 different filters; the only drawback is that as the parameter is nothing more than a list and is not tied to a data source, the parameters themselves do not filter so where region = North you shall still see sub-regions from other areas such as Norfolk, Herefordshire, Berkshire, Devon etc.

Again, I shall provide a santised version I swear by the end of this week...