I’ve been working on a sales dashboards where I am visualizing a set of transactional data. One of the requirements was for Tableau Server to recognize the user and their territory upon login. Easy peasy with Tableau User Filters right?
I want to show you how you can do this easily if you have the following complications:
- Multiple sales reps to 1 region– joining these two datasets will multiply your records (and over-report sales dramatically!).
- Have a large number of users (I have over 100 reps) and no time to update it manually and constantly as the team changes.
- Lots of sheets in your workbook and did not want to spend the time adding the user filter set to every sheet.
- You also dread Tableau’s inevitable “*” error on a blends for your joining table.
Big thanks to the Great Chris Love for this tip!
Step 1: Find Your List of Users and Pivot your Data
You’ll need 2 pieces of data – assigned Tableau Server Usernames, and their respective regions. I’ve mocked up a dummy data set to help illustrate with our favorite retail store – Superstore. Usually the USERNAME() function will be a reflection of your organization’s system username if your Tableau Server is using Active Directory to authenticate/login your users.
As you can see, we have 4 sales regions at Superstore, and 2 sales reps look after each region.
Quick view of my raw dataset
Tableau Usernames for Tableau User Filters
We need to pivot the data so it ends up as a lookup table, but concatenating usersnames to sit in 1 cell. I did this bit in Alteryx.
Alteryx Workflow for Tableau User Filters -Here’s what my workflow looked like with annotations.
BONUS TIP! Did you know you could annotate your tools instead of using the comments box? Much easier when you’re moving around tools in your workflow.
Step 2: Join your lookup table against your transactional data and output your data into Tableau!
Step 3: Connect your output (.tde/.csv) into Tableau and login to your Tableau Server
Connect your data source and sign into Tableau Server.
Step 4: Create the following calculation:
Since our usernames are concatenated to exist in 1 cell for every territory, this creates the association between 1 territory and many usernames upon a user’s sign-on.
Step 5: Create a data source filter using the calculation above and Select “True”.
The calculation will look up the username and will filter to the territory specified in your lookup table (now joined against the transaction data)
That was the last step!
You can use the navigation at the bottom to change users views just as you would with a set recommended by Tableau. Hopefully you’ll use this clever method of data pivoting to bring a better UI experience to your Tableau Server users.
If you’d like to download this workbook to see the other calculations, visualisations I have used, you can access the workbook here. Note that the filter will not work with your Tableau Server so I have removed it to avoid confusion.