In this instalment of my “10 things about Tableau 10” blog series, I’m going to go into the Highlighter tool. The Highlighter is a great new feature in Tableau 10 that allows for quick insights into your data without losing the context of the other data on the canvas – the fact that you can see patterns quickly on the canvas makes it incredibly powerful.
The Highlighter
So how does the Highlighter work? It works similarly to a the Quick Filter tool, but instead of including/excluding data from the canvas, it will leave the other data points visible. To enable the highlighter, you will need to have a dimension on the marks card and then select the “Show highlighter” using the context menu.
The Highlighter will appear on the right hand side of the canvas just as the Quick Filter does. To use the Highlighter, just start typing in the field. The tool will then highlight any dimension member which contains the letters in the field — this means you can search for members from your dimensions you don’t know the full name of. Handy for finds things like products.
The highlighter also works especially well with Scatter plots. With my customers plotted in relation to Sales and Profit, I can use the highlighter to see where my profitable and unprofitable customers are.
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