Dataskera

Shared Legend (Beta)

A dashboard whose sheets share a colour dimension shows one legend per sheet, stacked down the side, none of which does anything. This is one legend, and it drives all of them: click a member and every sheet it drives filters or highlights at once. It is a dashboard extension, so it takes a zone on the dashboard rather than a worksheet, and it is the first Dataskera extension of that kind, which is why it ships as a beta.

What It Needs

Configure it with:

  • Field, typed in Configure. The dimension carrying the members, for example Category or Region. Its members are read from the sheets themselves, so the legend follows the data instead of drifting from a list typed once.
  • Sheets it drives, ticked in Configure. Leave them all ticked and the legend drives the whole dashboard, including sheets added later.
  • A click does, Filter, Highlight or Nothing. Filter removes everything else from the sheets. Highlight keeps them whole and picks the member out. Nothing makes the legend a key rather than a control.

Add Shared Legend (Beta) to your dashboard

First, download the manifest file. It tells Tableau where to load the extension from.

Download sharedlegend.trex

Direct link: https://dataskera.com/downloads/sharedlegend.trex

Then, in Tableau:

  1. Open the dashboard, and from the Objects pane drag Extension onto it.
  2. In the Add an Extension dialog, choose Access Local Extensions, then open the sharedlegend.trex file you just downloaded.
  3. When Tableau asks, allow the extension to access the data in the workbook. It reads the sheets to find the members it shows.
  4. The welcome screen appears. Sign in with your Dataskera account, or on Tableau Desktop choose Use on Desktop without an account. See Signing in & access below.
  5. Open Configure, type the field the legend should show, tick the sheets it drives, and choose what a click does.
Tableau Server or Cloud:
A site admin must allow the extension by adding its URL to the site's safe list, and the view needs the Download Summary Data permission. Extension URL: https://vizextension.dataskera.com/sharedlegend/sharedlegend.html

Signing in & access

Shared Legend (Beta) is free. Whether you need to sign in depends only on what you are doing. Viewing a dashboard never asks for an account, and authoring is free too.

Viewing a dashboard
No account

People who only view a dashboard are never asked to sign in and are never blocked.

Editing on Tableau Desktop
Optional

Sign in, or continue without an account in a single click.

Editing on Server or Cloud
Free account

Sign in with your Dataskera account to author on the web.

No account yet? Create one free in under a minute. No credit card required.

Format panel

Open the Format panel from the extension menu to customize the chart. It is for the dashboard author and is not shown to viewers. It has four tabs:

  • Legend: the field, the sheets it drives, what a click does, multiple selection, fading, the title, the layout, the swatch and the text size.
  • Color: the palette and a colour per member, since this legend carries its own colours.
It carries its own colours, and here is why:
The Extensions API does not expose the colours Tableau painted inside a worksheet, so no dashboard extension can read them. This legend therefore has its own palette, on the Color tab. Against Dataskera charts, which read the same palette, the two agree by construction. Against a native Tableau sheet you match them by hand, or use Highlight, where agreement matters far less. That limit is stated in the extension itself rather than left to be discovered.
Nothing selected means no filter:
Clicking the last member off clears the filter rather than filtering to nothing, which would empty every sheet on the dashboard and read as a bug.
A sheet without the field is left alone:
It is never filtered, and the legend names it, so a sheet that quietly stopped responding is never a mystery.
Sixty members is the limit:
Past that a legend is a list, and a list is not a legend. The ones left off are counted.
Why it is a beta:
It is the first Dataskera extension on the dashboard API rather than the worksheet one. Everything here is verified in a browser against that API, and the beta label stays until it has been exercised on real dashboards in Tableau Cloud and Server.