Hey, it's Tim here. In 23.3, Tableau have announced a new feature called Dynamic Axis Ranges. It essentially allows you to change the axis range using a parameter. But there's a few quirks with this that kind of make it a little bit difficult to get to. So I'm going to show you the mechanics of how it works and point you to some resources of some of the best things you can do with this.
As ever, let's get stuck in. Okay, so I'm here inside of Tableau. I'm just going to set up a basic chart here just so we can work through.
I'm using the sample superstore data set so everyone can follow along with this. Let's go ahead and put sales and profit out there and we'll put manufacturer on detail just to give us a nice scatterplot. I'll actually rotate this 90 degrees by clicking that icon here at the top.
So this is our basic chart. Now, the way this feature works is in the access options. If you click on edit access, it gives you a new option underneath custom that allows you to choose a parameter. You can see here we've got the profit bin size and top customers parameters. Of course, those are not going to help our access.
So we're going to go ahead and set this back to automatic and set up the two points that we need. So for this one, I'm actually going to work with the X axis. So I'll go ahead and create a parameter and we'll call it X axis. So X hyphen axis. And we'll say this is the X axis start.
And we'll go ahead and just leave that as is and select OK. And then we'll go ahead and choose. Actually, we'll duplicate this just to make life a lot a bit easier.
And we'll just rename it instead. So we'll go ahead X axis start. We'll say X axis. and we'll hit enter and essentially that's going to be exactly the same parameter set up in exactly the same way so we don't have to think too much about it right click on that and we're going to hit show parameter we'll do that again over here if you don't know what happens when i do that it actually goes and shows them over here on the right hand side so it's going to be available there for us to tweak with so we'll go ahead and set this to 10 000 i'm just doing this so that you actually see something happen and we'll set the xs to start to zero these are sort of two logical things to understand Now we could name these after the measure that's actually on the x-axis.
So sales, there's an example. But for now, we'll leave that as is. Now, the secret sauce here is if we go to the x-axis now and select edit axis, we can go to custom. And now you'll see that those two are available.
So the start will say zero and you'll see the axis moves immediately. And the end is over there. And now you can see that's working. So, so far, so good. That is the basic of the feature.
And that's just how it works. So you're probably thinking, well. That's not nice to have to manually set the axis, right? It would be just good if it was more dynamic. And so that's where this sort of feature is sort of confusing because the actual basis of the feature isn't dynamic.
But what is dynamic is the ability to use parameter actions to change these parameters that we've set up. So the next thing we're going to do now is actually we're going to clear this axis. We're not going to use this as it were. So if I clear the axis, it actually goes and puts it back to automatic by default.
So if you clear the axis range, just remember it's not going to use that setting anymore. It's an important small detail to be aware of. Okay, we're going to go ahead and build a new chart, and I'll show you how you should really use this feature in a nutshell. So let's go ahead and bring in sales again, and this time we'll just bring in manufacturers. So essentially we only have one measure to work with here, the actual measure we're going to put on our axis.
We're going to sort it by largest to smallest, so we can just see this sort of interaction happening. And then we're going to do this on a dashboard, because everything I've just done, you can actually do on a dashboard as well. So if I bring out sheet one, and then sheet two, you notice that if I right click on the axis, you still have the ability to augment the axis here on the dashboard. So this is actually the best place to do it, because you also want to be working with the dashboard actions in order to change the parameters. So how are we going to do this?
Well, let me walk you through. So what we're going to do is when we select, let's say these four data points, I want this chart on the bottom to change the start and the end of the access. Now there's already this interaction in Tableau, which kind of makes this feature harder to understand where you went.
where and when you'd use it because if I just hit this filter, you automatically get a chart that adapts with the selection and the axis automatically changes. So that kind of sort of takes the allure away from this. So this is really going to be an edge case sort of feature that you're going to use in very specific instances where you want to finally control the axis.
But let me show you what that could look like. So if I go up to dashboard and we go to actions, what we want to do is set up an action on this specific dashboard. So this is the right place to be. and we're going to change the parameter value.
So the first one we're going to say is, we're going to just call it parameter one just to keep things simple. And this is the orchestration you need to be careful about. The source sheet, sheet one, is actually this one, okay? And we want to affect this sheet. But you don't need to select this sheet in this option.
What we actually want to do is target the parameter instead. So we're going to untick sheet number two. We're going to target the x-axis start.
We're going to use the field of sales. So the source field is actually going to be this axis here. So we'll go ahead and select sales.
And we're going to say when we select that chart, look at the sales value in that chart. We're going to select the minimum to match to the start of the axis. That's essentially what we're trying to do.
So we go ahead and set that up. There is one option missing here that I wish was there, which is an ability that when you sort of select, deselect the selection, it clears the axis but keeps the axis range setting enabled. It's sort of like a very nuanced feature, it's hard to explain unless you're sort of into the mechanics of this, but that would be the sort of nice thing to add here. So let the axis reset, but keep the axis range sort of listening for a new instruction as it were.
That's not currently possible because if it clears the axis range it loses that setting. as I showed you earlier. So we've set up one parameter.
Let's go ahead and set up the next one. I keep right clicking up there because I think it's possible and it's not. So let's go ahead, deselect sheet two. This time we're going to go to the end.
We're going to choose the same sales value. This time we're going to choose the max because we want the maximum value from our selection. I'd wish that option was here again. So we've got the two parameters set up.
And then for this next step, I'm actually going to do something just to make it easier to see what's happening. So I'll select the highlight action here. We'll go from sheet one, we'll deselect sheet two, and we're going to go to sheet two. We'll deselect sheet one in this particular case. And yeah, we'll just leave it as all fills.
We'll keep it super simple. I haven't even renamed these. That's really bad practice. Everyone knows that.
But two parameters, one highlight, I think we're set up. I think this is going to work. The last thing we need to do is of course, remember to set this to actually work to the axis ranges.
So go ahead and select edit axis. And we're going to go to custom. We'll say the start.
is the start and you'll see that nothing really happens because it's already there and the end is the end and you can actually see that happening okay so everything is set up everything's sort of working now let's actually test to see if this works if i select these two points you should see that it highlights the start and the end it doesn't filter them or highlight them but i think it it shows the real problem with this feature you see the axis has changed you can see it's saying one three five six five eight here so that is actually the minimum value that's set up from here you And the maximum value is 150,000 over there. But the problem is, is that the axis is set up exactly to those points. It kind of looks like we've kind of missed the mark. And you can see the global ends exactly where the axis starts. You can't actually see it, but it's selected.
So you can see that that's actually working. The better way to show you this maybe would be to sort of select maybe a range like this. And you can see that it's actually working.
But it has that sort of. problem where it needs a little bit of a buffer, it needs some sort of context setting. So the best way to really use this, I think, is just to get it to set the one point of the axis.
So if we go back here, edit the axis, and we go back and set the Starts to be automatic, this will just focus in on the specific selection we make. So if I select these two, then you'll see that we keep global in context, and if I select these, however many, it highlights them and it shows them here on the chart. So I think that's just a really nice setting. And ultimately, you'll probably then also want to filter because if you have to scroll down to look at everything that's selected, it's also sort of a little bit strange. So the mechanics of this do need a little bit of thinking.
It's not as sort of intuitive as it should have been out of the box. But nonetheless, I think I really like this feature. I'm sure people are going to figure out some great ways, which is why I'm going to bring you to a blog by Mark Reed, who, when the pre-release dropped, actually already wrote a blog about a month ago showing you ways you can use this. So he's got some really nice.
sort of written copy about how the mechanics of this works, how you can set it up, how you can set up the interactions, and how you can then essentially do a couple of things. Now, interestingly here, he's set the Viz to always show the entire data, which is why it's not suffering from that problem of seeing sort of the min and the max, as I had when I initially sort of set this up. But it's a pretty interesting sort of blog. It gives you lots of sort of examples of how you could use this.
And it maybe speaks to some capabilities that I think people will use in some really, really advanced use cases. So go ahead and check out Mark's blog. I'll put the link in the description as ever. But that's pretty much it.
That's this feature in a nutshell. I'm going to be making more videos about 23.3, obviously, over the next few days. So be sure to subscribe, share the love with whoever might want to know about these features.
And I'll catch you in the next video.