The “PictureThis” Premium extension for Tableau helps you create dynamic image grids or tables that can be used as an interactive filter in your dashboards. 

With just an image url in your dataset, the PictureThis extension dynamically generates a clickable image grid or table to be used as a filter or be filtered upon. No need to download or prep loads of images and manually define tons of url actions, this extension gets you started right away. Use your image grid or table as a filter in your dashboard without defining a single dashboard action. 

A getting started video can be found here: https://youtu.be/TOz6wplZHWQ 

This Product Guide explains how to use all the brilliant options of the PictureThis extension when you are creating a dashboard containing the interactive PictureThis Image Grid or Image Table. Below all the options of the “Configuration Screen” are explained. The content of the Configuration screen can differ from your version of the extension, we constantly keep improving and expanding the functionality extension which might result in new configuration options. If you want to keep track of all innovations, subscribe to our Quarterly “What’s New” webinars where we will keep you posted! 

A quick tip before you start: In general when you are working with Extensions, it is Best Practice to create a dedicated “datasheet” for your extension. This allows your general dashboard actions to interact with this datasheet and your Extension will dynamically respond to that. How to create a Datasheet for your PictureThis extension is explained here: https://youtu.be/TOz6wplZHWQ?t=57 

Once you have created your datasheet and added it to your dashboard you can start adding your extension to the dashboard. 

Use the dropdown menu of the container that holds your extension and select the “Configure” option.

This will open the configuration screen of the PictureThis extension.

The first you must do to configure your extension is select the datasheet that holds the columns that you want to use in your PictureThis Image Grid or Image Table. In your preparations it is important to first add the datasheet to your dashboard before configuring the extension. As stated before, it is highly recommended to use a dedicated datasheet for the extension (holding only the information necessary for the PictureThis extension). The datasheet needs to be present on the dashboard, but can of course be made invisible. A nice trick to do this is to make the datasheet floating and resize it to 1×1 pixels in Width and Height.

Now in the configuration screen select the worksheet you want to retrieve data from. This worksheet will be the input for PictureThis. You can always add extra fields to this datasheet and open the configure screen again to use them in your PictureThis extension (labels, colors, links etc.).

WARNING: Please do not change the name of your datasheet nor your dimensions and measures. Extensions store your configuration with a reference to the sheet names, dimension names and measure names. Changing any of these will force you to re-configure the extension.

Which column contains the image URL?

This setting is crucial for the PictureThis extension. You can see the list of fields (dimensions and measures) that are available on the datasheet you selected in the previous step. Just select the dimension that holds the url to your image. This must be a “http://” or “https://” url that is free accessible and not password protected. The image must be of the format jpg, png or gif.

Select additional data to display (optional)

You can show Additional information that will be shown in the Image Grid or Image Table. The additional information will be shown on an image level. The order they are chosen will be the same order shown within PictureThis. By default formatting (decimal, currency, percentage etc.) will be used from the default formatting options per dimension or measure in your datasheet.

Select layout

PictureThis has two basic layouts ‘Cards layout’ & ‘Table Layout’. Cards layout will show the images as a card with information underneath for example (the Image Grid). Table layout will result in a table showing your image present alongside your additional information on the same row.

Use the tick box to activate conditional coloring of your Cards. You can use one of the columns in your datasheet to trigger conditional Card coloring. This makes the special Cards stand out of the rest.

Choose the dimension and customise each card with their own color using the color palette. You can create something like the image below:

All fields you selected to be present in your Image Grid or Image Table can be Aliased and formatted according to your wishes. Change to a decimal, percentage, text or even a barcode! Add an alias on each as well as a prefix and a suffix.

Use the tick box to activate your custom card content. Here you can customize the content shown on the cards of your Image Grid. Add text and fields and customize exactly how you wish by using html and Bootstrap classes and styles. You can use the available fields only once. If you need to use a field twice, just duplicate it (use a different name) on your datasheet and the same field will be available twice (with a slightly different name). You can use html and bootstrap to customize the card content.

Best Practice is to remove the Aggregation methods from measures to support multilanguage Tableau deployments. For example if you want to use the Sales Measure in your Cards replace the “SUM(Sales)” by just “(Sales)”. This is necessary since the aggregation methods (Like SUM and AVG) have different names in different Tableau Localizations.

If you want to use a tooltip on your Cards or Table cells, use the tick box to enable it. Here you can configure what content is shown in your tooltip. Add text and fields and customize exactly how you wish. You can use fields only once. You can use html and bootstrap to customize the card content. Remove the agg methods from measures to support multilanguage Tableau deployments. For example SUM(Sales) à (Sales)

Text Format

Here you can set if you want the first field you selected to display in either the Cards or Table view to be printed in Bold or plain cast.

Text Align

In Table view you generally want to align your text to the left (or right when in an RTL region) while Cards view often looks best when text is centred in the Label of the Cards. This option allows you to setthe alignment of the text in your card or Table cell by choosing Left, Centre or Right.

Font size

Use the dropdown to change size of the font. Min size 6pt, max size 24pt

Font Family

Change the font from the dropdown to improve the look of your dashboard and match your Identity.

Action Type

PictureThis supports different types of Dashboard Actions. This Action Type setting allows you to set two of them; the Filter Action and the Highlight Action.

The Filter Action makes sure your target sheets get filtered when you select one or more images in the Image Table or Image Grid. The Highlight action will not filter the target sheets but highlight the marks that belong to the selected image in you Image Grid or Image Table.

Target Sheets

Decide which sheets will be triggered with your chosen Dashboard Action (Filter or Highlight).

Selected Field

Decide which field you want to select to trigger the dashboard actions on your Target sheets.

Filter type

Sometimes you want a dashboard action to be triggered on a single select only, sometimes you want to support multi selections as well. This option allows you to switch between both filter variations.

Parameter Action

A very powerful feature of the PictureThis extension is the Parameter action. You can set the value of a parameter by clicking the image in either your Image Grid or Image Table.

This configuration option lets you select the parameter you want to update on a selection. In the example below the parameter “PM Selected SKU” will be updated with the SKU when I select a product in my Image Grid of PictureThis:

It is important to have a parameter of type String that allows all values otherwise it will not be shown in the list of “Target Parameters”

URL Action

Another powerful action type is the URL action. This feature allows you to navigate to a url in a (new) Browser window just by clicking one of the images in the Image Grid or Image Table. You can use a calculated field to generate your target URL and add it to your datasheet. In the example below I have set the URL Action to navigate to my “Target URL” which is a calculated field that resides in the Data Sheet that feeds the extension

So when clicking on an image in the PictureThis Image Grid or Image Table, it will open a new browser tab showing the “Target URL”.

This is a powerful feature that can perfectly be used to navigate to another published dashboard and use the selection in the present dashboard to set filters while opening the new dashboard.

For example I can create a calculated field that navigates to my published dashboard called “salesmanager” in my “sales” workbook and it will be filtered on the selected product (SKU).