Types of Filters in Tableau

What are Filters in Tableau?

Let us first understand what filters are and what their purpose is.

Filtering is nothing but removing some scope of data from a data set. Filters serve many purposes such as minimizing the size of data for efficient use, eliminate irrelevant dimension elements, clean up underlying data and setting measure or date ranges for what you want to analyze.

There are mainly 6 types of Filters in Tableau :

1.Extract Filter

2.Data Source Filter

3.Context Filter

4.Dimension Filter

5.Measure Filter

6.Table Calculation Filter

Source:educba

Now let's try to understand each filter one by one

1. Extract Filter: Extract filter in Tableau are used to extract a small subset of data from the original data source. Tableau then creates a local copy of the data set that is to be stored in the repository. You can save a screenshot of how it looks in your workbook. These methods reduce Tableau queries. To further reduce the size of the data going into Tableau, you can apply filters to the extract, which can be either by a certain dimension or measurement.

2.Data Source Filter: This filter is applied directly to the data source also to restrict the amount of data and what data the user sees. One important thing to remember is if you apply this filter this affects to all the worksheets. Also this filter cannot be seen in Filter shelf since we have applied at data source level.

3.Context Filter: A Context Filter is a standalone Tableau filter that can create a new dataset from the original data set and compute the worksheet selections. Context Filters are used to boost the performance. You could run a context filter before any other Tableau Filters, and then apply the remaining filters on top of the data returned after context filtering.

4.Dimesion Filter: Dimensions are fields which contains categorical information. Filters applied on such dimensional data are called dimensional filters. Simply drag which dimension you want to filter shelf to create this filter.

5.Measure Filter: Measures are fields which contains quantitative data. Filters applied on such quantitative data are called measure filters. Simply drag which measure you want to filter shelf to create this filter.

6.Table Calculation Filter: The Table Calculation filter is the last filter that is applied after the view has been created. So if you want to filter the view without filtering the underlying data, Table Calculations Filters are the way to go.

Apart from these 6 filters there are many other filters like Global filters, User filters, Quick filter and Cascading filter.