For this week’s challenge, Kyle looked to solve a problem that he’s seen discussed within another blog – how to solve a highlighting problem when filtering donut charts.

I’ve been away on a little holiday abroad for a family wedding, so am on catch up this week. So I’m going to make this as brief as I can as time is limited.

Building the donut charts

Use the steps described in this blog post I wrote for my company to build a donut chart using the dual axis method.

For the Category donut chart, you will need Category on Colour and Sales on Angle of the outer Pie Chart. For the inner circle, you will need to add Sales to Text. Adjust the text as required. Sales needs to be formatted to $ with 0 dp.

For the Sub-Category donut chart, you will need to add Category to Colour. Then add Sub-Category to Detail and click on the 3 dots to the left of the Sub-Category pill and change to also add to Colour.

To adjust the colours, edit the colour legend, select all the options within the same Category. Select a sequential colour palette that matches the core colour for the category, then select Assign Palette. The colours should change to a range of that colour.

Create a new field

# Products

COUNTD([Product ID])

and add this to the Angle shelf. Add Sales to the Tooltip shelf and adjust the tooltip.

For the inner circle, add #Products to Text. Adjust the text as required

Filtering the donut

Add the two sheets to a dashboard. Add a dashboard filter action

Filter Cat

On select of the Category donut, target the Sub-Category donut chart passing in all fields. Keep filtered values when selection cleared.

Stopping the Category donut from being highlighted

Create new fields

True

TRUE

False

FALSE

and add these to the Detail shelf on the All Marks card of the Category donut sheet.

Then create a dashboard filter action

Unhighlight

On select of the Category donut on the dashboard, target the Category donut sheet itself, passing in the fields Tue = False. Show all values when selection cleared.

Now when the Category donut is clicked on, the other segments won’t fade. However, the selection is still visible – the edges of the pie are displayed.

Stop showing the selected section of the pie

For this we employ a trick mentioned in the blog post referenced in the challenge. Create a new field

Dummy

‘Dummy’

and add this the Detail shelf of a new sheet. Change the mark type to polygon so nothing is visible.

Add this to the dashboard as a floating object – make it small and place somewhere inconspicuous

Whilst the selections will still be visible when testing on Desktop, once published to Tableau Public, the presence of the polygon forces the whole dashboard to be rendered server side rather than client side. This reduces the amount of interactivity, and consequently the pie chart segments don’t display when clicked.

My published viz is here.

Happy vizzin’!

Donna