Creating filters for a sheet of data

A sheet is a layer of data in a dashboard. The data on each sheet is filtered independently of the data on other sheets in the dashboard.

If you want to filter the data in objects in the same way, place all the objects on a single sheet (or tab) and create a filter on the sheet.
If you want to filter data in objects in different ways, create a separate sheet for each set of objects to filter in the same way. Create a filter on each sheet.

For example, a dashboard contains the following sets of data:

Your revenue data broken out by geographical region and year, shown as a grid
Your revenue data broken out by geographical region and year, displayed as a heat map
Your revenue data broken out by geographical region and category, displayed as a bar graph

You want to select the regions to display in the grid and the heat map, but you want to select the range of revenue values to display in the bar graph. Create two sheets:

Sheet 1 contains the grid and heat map. Create the region filter on this sheet.
Sheet 2 contains the bar graph. Create the revenue filter on this sheet

A filter on a sheet filters the data in all the visualizations and also in any dataset objects displayed in text fields on the sheet.

For another example of filtered sheets, with images, see Layering and organizing data for filtering.

You can filter data based on attribute values, metric values, or metric rank. For steps, see the following:

Creating an attribute filter for a sheet

Creating a metric filter for a sheet

A metric filter calculates the metric for the attributes in the sheet’s visualizations. If a grid contains geographical region and state data, the metrics are calculated for each state, not each region. You create a metric filter to display the top five profit values, and the profit values are calculated for each state. If you want to display the top five most profitable regions, create a metric filter that ranks the values of an attribute. For steps, see Creating a metric filter that ranks the values of an attribute.

The Filter panel

A filter that targets the data in a sheet is displayed on the Filter panel.

You can change how the Filter panel is displayed. For example, you can show or hide the Filter panel, collapse or expand all the filters in the panel, collapse or expand an individual filter, and move the Filter panel to a different location on the dashboard. For steps, see Formatting a dashboard.

By default, as you make choices in the Filter panel, the data in the sheet is updated automatically. You can change this behavior so that you control when the update occurs, by disabling automatic apply. When automatic apply is disabled, you click Apply in the Filter panel to update the sheet with the filter choices. Disabling automatic apply can be helpful when your sheet contains large amounts of data, so that the data is not updated for each change in a filter. Instead, the data can be updated after all the changes have been made. For steps, see Applying filter changes individually or all at once.

You can allow users to filter the data displayed in a dashboard by selecting options in the Filters panel. For example, a dashboard displays sales data for several different product categories, from 2007 to 2010. An analyst can filter the data in the dashboard to only display sales data for the books and movies categories in 2010.

When you add filters to a dashboard, the filters are added to the currently displayed sheet, and do not affect filtering in other sheets in the dashboard. You can create the following types of filters:

You can add a filter based on an attribute. For steps, see Creating an attribute filter for a sheet.
Once you have added an attribute filter to the Filters panel, you can create a new filter based on the ranking of each value in the attribute. For example, you can add an attribute filter based on product category, then create a filter that displays data for the top three categories by sales. For steps, see Creating a metric filter that ranks the values of an attribute.
You can add a filter based on a metric. For steps, see Creating a metric filter for a sheet.

Creating filters for a sheet of data

The Filter panel

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