Tableau: using calculated fields for filtering dimensions

Question

I am currently creating some dashboards in tableau and I am stuck at a point, I tried finding solutions online but no go. So I thought maybe I can ask you.

1)The data I am looking at shows customer purchase value per department.

2) So I am having 2 dimensions: ‘customer name’ and ‘department’, and 1 measure: ‘sales’

3) I created a calculated field which gives all the customers that have bought from a selected department. For eg. When I select Printers from a parameter field, I get all the customers that have bought printer.

4) Now my task is to find what else have these ‘printer customers’ bought, because a customer can buy from multiple departments.

My problem is I am not able to filter ‘customer name’ dimension so that it only shows the printer customers that I have calculated based on my parameter selection.

I would really appreciate if you can throw some light in the right direction.

Answer 1

Well, actually you can do that.

Drag "Customer name" to filter. Select the "Condition" tab. Suppose your paramater is named "Chosen department". You could create a condition like:

SUM(IF [department] = [Chosen department] THEN 1 END) > 0

This will basically get all the clients that have at least 1 sale on that chosen department

Answer 2

You can create one more sheet which has Customer wise all the data and in the dashboard you can add both sheets and create an action filter. When you create a dashboard, under dashboard menu click on Actions -> Add action -> Filter. Select on which sheet you wanna click and which sheet needs to be updated and also select Run action on: Select.

So when you click on that particular customer in a department in one sheet it will show all the departments from which he has bought.

You can check about the filter actions in these links: http://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/actions_filter.html http://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/actions_filter.html