Tableau Set Control Part 1: The Basics

A Sets Timeline

Sets have been part of Tableau for a long time (well before I started using it back in 2016), but historically, their uses have been somewhat limited because there was no way for your users to add or remove items from them. You, as an author, had to create the sets upfront and they were mostly static from there. Granted, there was some ability to make them dynamic using conditions or Top N, but interactivity by the user wasn’t allowed.

 

This changed in version 2018.3 when Set Actions were released. Set Actions allowed us to create user interface components that would add or remove items from sets. If you were using Tableau at that time, you’ll know that this led to a ton of innovation by the Tableau community. People were using set actions to do all kinds of incredible things that were never possible before (For a master class in set actions, check out the work of Lindsey Poulter). But set actions still required that we create new or leverage existing UI components to interact with sets. In many cases, these components were time-consuming and difficult (and sometimes impossible) to create.

 

Fortunately, with the 2020.2 release of Set Control, it is now easier than ever to allow users to interact with sets, allowing us to easily handle use cases that were either laborious or impossible previously. While set control is not particularly new, I feel that it is particularly under-utilized. I think this is because they are not quite as straightforward as other features and they often require a somewhat different way of thinking. So, in this three-part blog series, I plan to first introduce the set control and its most basic use case, then dive into a handful of more involved use cases. My hope is that these use cases will give you a good understanding of the types of situations where set control can be valuable and that you’re able to translate them into opportunities to use them in your own work.

 

What is Set Control?

Set Control allows us to display a filter-like dialog that can control the makeup of a set. The example below shows a sheet with a filter and set control.

 

 

Since it looks like a filter, your users don’t need to be trained on its use—they just click the boxes to select what they want. But, it’s not a filter. Items that are selected/checked in the set control are those that are “In” the set and the unselected items are “Out” of the set. Like parameters, sets don’t do anything until we use them on our view.

 

The Basics

The most rudimentary use case for sets & set control is simple filtering. Filippos Lymperopoulos, Former Director of Product Management at Tableau Software, once referred to sets as “named filters that can be used in calculations.”

 

Slide from our TC22 presentation, How to Do Cool Things in Tableau

 

What on earth does he mean by this? Well, let me show you…

 

The following worksheet shows sales by month with a filter on Category.

 

 

We can do the same thing with a set. We start by creating a set on Category. Then we right-click and drag that to the filter pane. When prompted, we choose the “In/Out” option and choose to show “In” values only. Next, we right-click the new filter and choose the “Show Set” option. This displays what looks like a filter, but is actually the set control:

 

 

Selecting/deselecting items in the set control will cause the view to only show those that are “in” the set.

 

But, as Filippos noted, sets can be used in calculated fields. So, let’s do the same type of filtering using a calculated field. When used in a calculated field, a set will return a Boolean value (TRUE/FALSE) depending on whether or not the value is in the set. This is important, so let me explain a little further. In our situation, Category Set is a set on Category. We’ve selected “Furniture” and “Technology” to be in the set and “Office Supplies” to be out of it.

 

 

To see the value that is returned, let’s create a simple calculated field like this:

 

Category Set Value

[Category Set]

 

If we drop that on a view along with Category, we’ll see the following.

 

 

Furniture and Technology are TRUE because they are in the set and Office Supplies is FALSE because it is not.

 

Technically, we could use this calculated field, drop it on the filter pane, then choose to only show “True” values. However, Boolean logic can be a bit confusing to people, so I like to make my calculated fields a little easier to understand by writing out a full IF/THEN statement.

 

Set Filter

// Hide anything not in the set.

// Note: Sets return TRUE if in the set and FALSE if out.

IF [Category Set] THEN

    "Keep"

ELSE

    "Hide"

END

 

Now we drag this to the filter pane and choose to show “Keep” values only.

 

 

But we also need to show the set control so our users can interact with the set. To do that, we drag the set to the detail card, then right-click it and choose “Show Set”

 

 

Congratulations! You’ve now used sets to filter your view and the set control to allow your users to control which values are in the set. You’ve done this using both the set itself and a calculated field. In other words, you’ve taken a bunch of extra steps to do what you could have much more easily done with a simple filter 😉. Of course, this is just the beginning. Now that we have this foundational information on how the set control works, we can use it to solve a bunch of really interesting problems. In the second and third blogs of this series, we’ll dive into some more complicated use cases which really showcase the power of set control.

 

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments.

See the companion workbook here: Tableau Set Control Use Cases

 

Ken Flerlage, October 10, 2022

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