Tableau | How to publish hidden but accessible dashboards to tableau server

Drilldown capability is a common and very useful functionality in dashboarding which enables the users to view the details at any particular granular level without making the dashboard cluttered.

How drilldown capability is relevant to the blog?

If you wanted to create a drilldown for a dashboard 1, its common that we create another dashboard 2 with a granular level information and connect these two dashboards using action filters. This creates a drilldown capability for dashboard 1. However, to make the drilldown work seamlessly, we might have to publish all the dashboards, in this case both dashboard 1 and dashboard 2 to tableau server.

This might not look better when you have multiple drilldown dashboards as they all might appear on server. When you try to just uncheck “show sheet as tabs” option while publishing, sometimes the drilldown dashboard opens as a new window instead of opening within the same dashboard. To avoid this complexities, its possible to make the screen appealing even by publishing all dashboards to server and make it hidden but accessible. Lets continue to read to learn about it…

How to publish hidden but accessible dashboards to tableau server?

This is a simple and easy trick which might make you wonder.

Step 1: In the main dashboard, in our case dashboard 1, add a navigation button and give dashboard 2 in Navigate to section.

Step 2: Change the background color of navigation button to None and set the height and width of the same to 1 so that its very small and not visible to user.

Step 3: While publishing dashboard 1 and dashboard 2 to server, uncheck Show sheet as tabs option and publish the dashboard.

Note: When you have multiple dashboards, this trick requires you to create navigation buttons separately for each dashboard so that you can navigate to them on server since unchecking show sheet as tabs wont show the dashboard tabs in the server.

That's it! this simple 3-step trick can enable the drilldown capability from dashboard 1 to dashboard 2 without showing dashboard 2 at the top of tableau server.

Hope you find this trick interesting and useful. Thanks for reading!