Tobias, one option is to include the info you want in the tool tip. With a bit of ingenuity you can cram a lot of info into a tool tip:

This was taken from Andy Cotgreave's Data Studio blog here: http://www.thedatastudio.co.uk/blog/the-data-studio-blog/andy-cotgreave/sparkbar-tooltips He has some other tool tip tricks here:  http://www.thedatastudio.co.uk/category/tableau/tooltips

--Shawn

Tobi,

If you want a details table and really haven't got a suitable measure, you can always create a measure out of an attribute. Along the lines of min([Attribute field]). Then make sure you have an id field or the like in to keep the table at the detail level. (I initially thought you should just add the number of records as the measure then hide the column, but that doesn't seem easy to do.)

If you include this along with a chart, you can then make the chart into a filter and the two become linked. Right click the chart and select "Use as filter". 

The workbook attached has something similar. Was this the sort of thing you were after?

Steve

I see what you mean, Tobi. It is pretty annoying that Tableau doesn't allow more than one text measure. I can't see an obvious way round that.

I thought you could use a single text measure with a formula to vary what it displays. The problem is you need something to trigger a number of different rows to appear in the table. Duplicating all your data would work - but not what you need!

One alternative is to bring in a separate data source with, say, seven dummy rows and then use that to trigger seven rows in a table. Slap your formula in to a measure and you have something close. You aren't going to want to display many records in this way or it will blow the performance. Probably best to use it as a detail table for a single row.

The problem then is filtering. Since you have a worksheet with the primary data source being the dummy rows, filtering on the secondary (original) data set doesn't work. The actions filtering on the dashboards do though. So you can get it set up to filter based on a selection from a more standard list worksheet with the details for the selected row being displayed.

Understand that? I'm not sure I do! Take a look...

(Not sure whether it will be of any use in practice, but it helped me understand better how the merging and filtering of datasets works!)

Hello friends -

Depending on the complexity of your data, you could try mapping text columns to understood (but logically bogus) numeric values, and then utilize shapes / images to get you there.  I did something similar to this in reverse once; I had some numeric data (i.e., ratings on a 1-5 basis) that my consumers wanted to understand as 'strongly disagree/disagree/neutral/agree/strongly agree.  It took a good deal of data pre-processing/cyborging, but eventually I mapped a view such that I had columns like this:

response 1 numeric: 5

response 1 text:  strongly agree

response 2 numeric: 3

response 2 text: neutral

Then, you can bring your measures into a table, and paint by shape, and then utilize the custom shape component to illustrate your data.  I can't upload the workbook proper due to data concerns, but here's a screenshot of what I eventually was able to do.

Clearly if you have a ton of data, or dynamic data this might be too cumbersome, but for some types of data sets, it might be worth it. 

brian

Guys,

You can set the number of dimensions visible one the row and column shelves before combining by using Analysis | Table Layout | Advanced.  Then in the Rows and Columns section of the dialog, increase the default of 6.  The max is 16.

MANY BLESSINGS!

Peace and All Good!

Michael W Cristiani

Hi Tobias,

A workaround for the issue where Tableau does not create a horizontal scrollbar on the dimensions is to add additional text columns by add additional (fake) axes to the view. I combined a bunch of different ways to do this and enable different forms of conditional formatting in the following post:

http://community.tableau.com/message/171852

Jonathan

Hello Steve

It is very interesting this solution that you provided to the detail window , it is exactly what I am looking for.

The only problem that I find with the workbook that you provided is that I cannot take a look at the SQL query you used for one of the data sources. Could you please post it so I can take a look at it ? I have to say that I have no idea how you made it so that when the column dimension is placed in the spreadsheet it does not displays the numbers 1 through 8 that I am guessing is what you set on the script.

Thanks a lot.

Hello Brain,

Thanks for your earlier post here about mapping numbers to text columns. I need to map the text column values to numbers and was wondering how you managed to get the mapping done in your case? It's not intuitive in Tableau Desktop somehow.

Could you (or anyone else in the Tableau community here) help me out?

Best regards,

Boris