Last week a customer me asked how her users could easily navigate between the many dashboards she has built for her stakeholders. Of course my first thought was to use actions and I gave her this link. But as I built that out to show her, I found it awkward because URL actions won’t accept a variable for the URL (although you can embed a variable within the URL).
To overcome this, I found a slightly different approach that I like better. It’s using the table format option to make URLs active links. In this post, I show how that’s done. There are 3 steps to implement this:
- Create a separate dataset with the Dashboard Names and their URLs
- Create a table visualization from that dataset
- Format the table to make the URLs active links
Here are the details…
Step 1, Create a separate dataset
I created a spreadsheet with two columns, Dashboard Name and Dashboard URL and uploaded those as separate dataset that I named ‘dashboard_list2’:
I then added it as a new dataset to an existing analysis:
Step 2, Create a table visualization
From there, I simply added a table visual from the dashboard_list2 dataset and included both fields:
Step 3, Format the table
Finally, I clicked the pencil to format the visual:
I clicked the Field styling panel, selected the Dashboard URL field from the dropdown and then selected the Make URLs radio button. You’ll see the URLs in the table changed to links:
I added a descriptive title to the visualization was done!
Now users have an easy way to go from dashboard to dashboard!
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