Have you ever built a viz that was practically perfect*, except for one little thing?
Every time you click on a data point, that one stays dark and everything else goes light.
While I understand the logic behind Tableau making this an automatic action, sometimes it is really unhelpful.
Fear not, I have a quick little solution for you.
We’ll start off by creating a new Calculated Field. I call mine “No Highlight” to keep things as clear as possible for myself. There may be a time where you do actually want to have a highlight field, and I can imagine myself spending entirely too long trying to figure out why my actual highlight isn’t working because I dropped the wrong field in.
Inside the calculated field, you can put anything you want. If it’s a string, make sure to put it in quotation marks.
Once you’ve created the calculation, drop it on Detail in the Marks pane.
You have a couple of options here. I’ll show you the more complex one first, and then the one that I’ve found myself using more often afterwards.
Open up a Worksheet Action (Ctrl-Shift-A, if you’re into keyboard shortcuts), and add a new highlight action to this worksheet.
You’ll select the source and target sheets for this action. In this case, I only have one sheet in the workbook, so I don’t need to make any changes to those sections.
You’ll then go down to the “Target Highlighting” section and first select “Selected Fields” and then your “No Highlight” field. Click OK and there ya go!
For this second method, you’ll follow the same steps up through dropping the field on Detail in the Mark pane, then you’ll go to the toolbar and select the small highlight tool, as seen below, and then select the “No Highlight” field.
And there you are! A beautifully, unhighlighted chart.
An important thing to note is that each of those methods will only work on the individual sheet that you’ve turned it on for.
If you want it to apply to an entire dashboard, you’ll need to drop “No Highlight” on Detail on the Marks pane of each sheet in the dashboard, and then create a dashboard highlight action (the shortcut for that is Ctrl-Shift-D).
You’ll then select every sheet that contains a viz you want to not highlight, and select “No Highlight” as the selected field in “Target Highlighting.”
*if you have, I’m impressed and jealous. I am far from reaching that level of nirvana.