Week 35: Drill Down & Up on Sales with Subtotals using Parameter Actions

In the final week of the community challengers we have Rosario Guana. She is a Tableau Ambassador and a Tableau Zen Master. Rosario has been championing WorkoutWednesday since day 1, she writes blog posts about solutions and other tips and tricks in both English and Spanish.

When Tableau 2019.2 was launched, I soon found myself testing the new functionality of Parameter Actions, to learn more about its use and its benefits.

In the first Drill Down tests, I used examples that involved 3 or more levels of Drill Down and the logic that followed was scalable, regardless of the number of levels. But when I did a test that involved only two levels, the formulas I was using required some adjustments.

For this test, I was inspired by a previous challenge of Luke Stanke, seen during the first week of the year: “Drill Down in Sales”

And taking advantage of the fact that I was already in stages of tests and learning, along the way I was integrating some additional requirements to the original challenge, which I hope you find interesting.

Requirements

• The size of the board is 800 px wide by 600 px high. 
• The solution should not involve duplicating the data.
• The initial view should show sales by Category for the last 3 years, in bar chart.
• The new Parameter Actions functionality must be used to apply Drill Down & Up: 
  • By clicking on a new Category: 
  • Sales by Sub-Category should be shown on a bar chart below it.
  • The name of the Sub-Category must be preceded by the following string ”     ↳”.
  •  The total amounts of sales of each of the Categories must be shown as text.
  • When doing again, click on the previously selected Category or when clicking on any of the Sub-Categories a Drill Up is applied.
    • The original view will be restored, that is, sales by Category will be displayed on a bar chart.
• Use the right arrow “►” and the down arrow “▼” to indicate when the details are displayed.
• The information must be sorted in descending order by the amount of the sales of the last year.
• Match the edges of the rows and the shading of the rows to highlight values.

Dataset

This week uses the superstore dataset for Tableau 2019.1+.  You can get it here at data.world

Attribute

When you publish your solution on Tableau Public make sure to take the time and include a link to the original inspiration.

Share

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtag #WorkoutWednesday2019 and tag @RosarioGuanag @AnnUJackson, @LukeStanke, @lorna_eden, and @curtisharris_!