Raise your game by Drilling Down

A dashboard is designed to take the user as close to an action that improves your organization’s performance. The deeper you dig into the data, the more questions you will find. These questions enable you to look at the information and analyze it from different points of view. Drilling down allows users to explore specific information in a dashboard from different angles by shifting from an overview of data to a more detailed picture using the same dataset.

The different ways we can Drill Down in Tableau

Tableau Coach Steve Adams from Visual DJ, a valued partner of Apps for Tableau, presented multiple ways to Drill Down in the Tableau Analytics TUG.

  • Creating Hierarchies

  • Adding Groups to reduce the number of rows

  • Single Member Drill Down from one element into a second dimension

  • Dashboard Filter Action to Drill Down from a Map to a Bar to a Scatter Chart

  • Viz in Tooltip to Drill Down to a 4th level of detail

  • Dashboard Filter & Navigate to a different Dashboard to Drill Down to row-level information

  • Select an item and navigate to a record in a 3rd party application

Improving self-service for your end-users

Another way to Drill Down in Tableau is to use the DrillDownTree Extension. The power of the DrillDownTree Extension is that it opens up many drill-through paths for your end user to choose based upon the answers that are provided, with minimal development time for the dashboard builder.

A good use case for using the DrillDownTree is ad hoc and root-cause analysis. In this case, you want to transfer from the bigger picture to a lower level to pinpoint your issue’s root cause. The Extension shows a Tree Map where you can Drill Down on a measure and drill it down on any dimension. As a result of this Tree Map, you can ask relevant questions such as ‘Why is my sales not working out in X area?’. Get to the cause of these questions, analyze what caused it, and follow up!

DrillDownTree finance industry
Decomposition tree extension by AppsforTableau - a Tableau Dashboard extension to ad-hoc drill down a measure on different dimensions

  • Visualize and Drill Down on any dimension

  • Automatically aggregate data

  • Conduct Root-Cause analysis and ad hoc exploration

  • Improve the self-service of your dashboard users

  • Governed and Secured

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