Avoid This Common Mistake

If you’re anything like me when building dashboards, you eventually hit a rhythm—visualizing the end product and duplicating existing sheets to quickly build new visuals using familiar dimensions and measures. Development might span several days, and then, suddenly, something feels off. You revisit a previously built sheet and notice the results aren’t quite right.

What happened?

It’s something deceptively simple—but a silent saboteur if you’re not aware: shared filters.

Tableau offers plenty of helpful features to streamline your workflow, and one of them is the ability to apply a single filter across multiple sheets. It’s a huge time-saver when building dashboards composed of multiple views that should all respond to the same filter. But if you unknowingly modify or remove that shared filter, it can quietly disrupt everything—leading to misleading visuals and confusion down the line.

The below shows an image of how you can assign filters across many assets in your dashboard build.

When duplicating a sheet; all filters, sets and groups are copied over as linked objects. Removing those filters on a duplicated sheet will remove them EVERYWHERE they are used.

Now you could just train yourself to start with a blank sheet every single time; but lets be honest. We don’t do that! So as a quick tip; once you’ve duplicated your sheet; assess those filters. Know that you have just created another linked sheet to those filters whether you wanted to or not.

Without this nugget of knowledge you are silently destructing work you’ve already built in your visualization.

Remember: If you duplicate sheets; you’re creating more linked components (like filters). So review those filters; right-click them and apply to “Only This Worksheet”. Now you can remove any filters with ease of mind.

How do you know if that filter is shared?

Right-click the filter and select “Apply to Worksheets”; if you see multiple sheets selected watch out for that silent assassin.