Anyone who has used action filters likely knows all too well about the leftover actions within filter panes on worksheets, and while they serve a great purpose and are absolutely necessary when you have defined action filters within your workbook, there are some occasions you might want to clean up your workbook by removing them from each worksheet, while still preserving the actual action filter definitions you have purposely defined on your worksheets and dashboards.
Sometimes these leftover actions sitting in the filter pane of your worksheets will even conflict with other filters you have applied, resulting in unexpected behaviour.
So, my question is, how can I clean up these action filters on my worksheets, without impacting my action filter definitions that exist on my dashboards? Well, you *could* navigate to each worksheet one-by-one, and multi-select the action filters in the filter pane and delete them, but what if I told you that you can bulk delete them from the entire workbook all at once?
What happens in Tableau when you create an action filter definition?
To demonstrate how to bulk delete these actions from the filter pane of all worksheets, first allow me to cover the basics of what happens in Tableau after you interact with a dashboard that contains action filters.
Initially, nothing else will happen after you have created an action filter definition apart from that definition existing in the workbook, ready to go. The magic happens after interacting with a worksheet on a dashboard where your action filter applies. This results in two things –
- That interaction generates a filter on the worksheet (seen in Fig 1 above)
- The filter is also added as a hidden dimension in the data pane, as pictured below
It’s clean-up time!
Now that you have an understanding of what’s happening behind the scenes in Tableau after making use of an action filter, clean-up is quite straightforward!
- Enable Show Hidden Fields in the Data pane
- Multi-select all of the actions in the Data pane
- Right-click + delete – you will need to confirm this action, which is just warning you because all of your actions exist on different worksheets. We already know this is the case, and do want to remove them
- After you have cleaned up these actions, the next time you interact with a dashboard, they will start to re-appear as is normal behaviour
But is it safe?
From my understanding, the only time this bulk delete is NOT SAFE, is if you have created some “Clearing the selection will EXCLUDE all values” actions. If that is the case, you will want to somehow identify them in the Data pane and not select them when deleting, or after you have deleted them, go and interact with that dashboard to re-add them back in.
Conclusion
So, as you can see – yes, it is possible to bulk clean-up actions that exist in the filter panes of your worksheets. A niche tip, but one that may come in handy one day.
