We have updated our Power Tools branding. Any references to software/feature naming conventions may no longer be accurate in this article.

We’re running a blog series dedicated to helping you improve the performance of Tableau in your environment. It all starts with the Best Practice Analyzer from Workbook Tools for Tableau. This feature lets you know exactly how you can improve your Tableau workbooks to run faster and smoother.

Each post in the series is related to specific performance issues that are flagged by the Best Practice Analyzer. If you don’t have it yet, get it. You can also check out more guidelines found on our Tableau Performance Checklist.

What Are Quick Filters?

Quick Filters, like many things in Tableau, are easy to use, quick to implement and, when used properly, can be extremely effective. With the click of a mouse, they can turn a worksheet or even an entire dashboard into an interactive landscape. In such a landscape,  an end user can tell a story or drill down to a piece of information they may have otherwise missed. Like most things in life, there comes a point where one can have too much of a good thing.

At what point does a quick filter reach that threshold? Surely we can’t expect to go through each worksheet and manually check each of our filters. Luckily, there’s an app for that.

The Flag

Upon running the Best Practice Analyzer, you receive the following notification:

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The Solution

quick-filter-2Instead of utilizing drop-down or multi-select lists for your quick filter, try Wildcard instead.  Because Tableau does not have to query on each member of the dimension, load times should dramatically improve.

Alternatively, you could choose to utilize dashboard actions as a quick filter method. Say, for instance, your initial filter is set to allow you to choose from any of the countries in which your country does business. Instead of using a quick filter, try creating a map. With this map, end users can still select and view detailed metrics from each country.

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