How to Handle the Drill on Subtotals in Tableau?

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

If I create a table viz in tableau Which has subtotals in it, when I drill on the subtotal value it shows all the values instead of showing only the subtotal data?

Solution:

Let’s first understand the problem statement?

We have a summary dashboard with Product Category, Product Sub Category as dimensions with subtotal for each Product Category.

I have another Detailed Dashboard which gives us the details for State, Country and Sales Amount.

Now let’s create an action (drill from the summary page to Detailed Page).

Below is the action setup that we are using:

Now we will see what happens when I click on the subtotal of ‘Furniture’:

On the drill page, it should have shown me the subcategories which fall under ‘Furniture’ Category. But I can see all the subcategories on the drill page. So the filter on subtotal is not working here.

As we are now able to successfully create the problem mentioned above. Let’s look out for the solution or ways to handle this.

• 1. Uncheck the ‘Run on single Select’ option

  • (a) We can uncheck the option of ‘Run on single select only’ and let the user select more than one value for the drill action.

  • (b) So what this does is, it let the user click on the header ‘Product Category’ and get the desired action results.

    And now the drill is working fine, showing us the product category ‘Furniture’
• 2. Create another sheet for the subtotal

  This solution is feasible only if you are sure about the dimension values that won’t change in near future and the dimension values are very few.

  For our example, we are using ‘Customer Category’ dimension with values ‘Corporate’ and ‘Consumer’

  • (a) First we will create each sheet for ‘Consumer’ and ‘Corporate’ values and place them one below the other in a vertical container.

  • (b) Now we will create each sheet for the subtotal of Consumer and Corporate and place them below each of the sheets created for Consumer and Corporate.

  • (c) Now remove the padding for all the sheets and do the formatting for subtotals.

  • (d) Now we can create an action on these 4 sheets that will take us to the detailed page. Let’s click on Consumer Subtotal and see if our drill works fine.

    So now the drill is working fine:

Conclusion

Thus, the above two options will help us in tableau professional services to solve the issue of subtotal drills. You can choose one of the above depending on your requirements.