Have you ever wanted to give your viewers the possibility to filter a widget with a single click? Somewhat like the image below, that lets a user click on either the Best Selling Products or Least Selling Products and see the appropriate products in the pivot and their respective sales, cost and profit. Here's how you do it.
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Step 1: Create a pivot with all products and required measures.
This step is pretty straight forward. Create a pivot and populate it with the Product dimension as well as the require measures. If you've never worked with a pivot table before, check out this tutorial. This pivot should look something like the follow image.
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Step 2: Create 'Best Selling Products' and 'Worst Selling Products' Filters
I quickly create Best Selling Products and Worst Selling Products by using Question Composition. If you've never used it before, check out this blog post. The filters will look something like this:
For more information about the different filter types, check out the filters section of our user guide.
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Step 3: Create drop-down lists from 'Best Selling Products' and 'Worst Selling Products' Filters
Create the filters, dragging and dropping them directly onto the sheet will automatically create a drop-down list widget out of each filter.
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Step 4: Using the Apply Scope On Widget Action Button
This is where lies the trick. The Apply Scope on Widgets action button lets you apply the data placed in one widget as the scope of another widget. It is accessed from the 'Actions' category in the Widgets pane and created simply by dragging onto the sheet.
This button takes two main parameters (accessed from the right-click menu):
1. Input Widgets - Indicates where to get the scope data from. In our case, this data is placed in the Product drop-down list widgets.
2. Output Widgets - Indicates the widget the receives the new data. In our case, this is the pivot showing product sales, cost and profit information.
You should create two buttons like these. Each button will define one of the Products drop-downs as input. The output for both the buttons will be the pivot widget. Make sure the (ALL) value is selected, to indicate that the all members should be used as scope. After doing this, you should immediately have two buttons that shows the correct filters in the pivot once clicked.
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Step 5: Some Finishing Touches
Our dashboard already does what we want it to, but let's make it a little bit more elegant. First, there's no reason anyone should see the drop-down lists we used so you can simply hide them behind the main pivot. Move them both so they are completely overlapped by the pivot and use the positioning menu to send them back behind the pivot so they cannot be seen.
Second, let's give the buttons themselves look more like hyperlinks than buttons (everybody loves a good hyperlink). To do this, simply select the button and set 'No Fill' coloring to both the button's area (middle button in the image below) and borders (right button in the image below). Then apply blue underlined text coloring (left button in the image below) and we're done.
...and were done! Here's a sample PSM file to play around with.