Seamless Sheet Swapping

[Updates on the technique:
1. Seamless Sheet Swapping with Containers
This fixes the problem of displaying tooltips in lower worksheets.
2. Sheet Swapping with Pie/Tree Map/Packed Bubble Charts
It shows how to turn on/off gridless charts in sheet swapping.
]

In this blog, we propose an approach that solves the problem of sheet alignment, no matter how many sheets you have.

Sheet swapping/selecting is an interesting technique that has broad applications. In short it allows us to display multiple sheets on one canvas, one at a time. It provides a good alternative to the story points and enables various display options. A big advantage over story points is one can use global filters.

A popular approach to it is using a container and dropping all the sheets into the container. Each sheet is set to the Entire View. The problem is, although one sheet is shown at a time, we still see the ghost of the remnants of the other sheets. It takes extra spaces at the top and the bottom of the container. The sheets will shift up or down when selected. The effect is quite visible to human eyes and looks annoying.

Here we propose a containerless approach without the shifting issues. The steps are as follows:
1.Set up the selector as a parameter which is described here
http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/creating-sheet-selector-for-dashboard
In my example, I assigned the parameter values as 1,2,3. The descriptions are Line, Bar and Circle.

2.Create a filter and set it up as described in the above KB article.

3.Drag all the sheets to the dashboard in Floating mode. Set them to entire view and turn on the selector. No container please.

4.In the Layout Manager (lower left corner), set up the position for each of the 3 sheets the same:
x=0;y=0;w=800;h=600. Move the Chart Selector to the top.

That's it. You will save yourself from the worrisome sheet alignment issues.  Click the following image to go to the interactive version.

In the container approach, it saves us a few steps of positioning the worksheets. But it causes us the pain of misalignment. In our approach, we position every chart the same, which is a bit manual but repetitive. Not a bad exercise though. The charts thus positioned are exactly on top of each other without a single nano-meter of shift.

Similar approach is applied to a recent viz where the selector is based on action filters. Check it out here:
http://vizdiff.blogspot.com/2016/02/tableau-ambassadors-2016.html