Dynamically Change Axis Start and End Values

The new Dynamic Axis Ranges feature in v2023.3 of Tableau enables you to change the chart axis start and end values based on parameters. Combined with parameter actions, this makes your dashboards more dynamic and reactive to user interaction. 

Manually change axis values

To make the axis use a parameter value for its start or end value, edit the axis and then select a parameter as shown in the animation below:

You can then change the parameter values and the axis in the chart will update.

Passing values from one chart to another

Another more useful scenario might be selecting values in one chart and changing the maximum axis value in a different chart to be the maximum of those values selected in the first chart. This would make the difference between the selected values more pronounced and easier to see. 

You can see this in the example below. Watch the X-axis in the bar chart adjust as marks are selected in the scatter plot.

Below is the parameter action that was used. Of the marks selected, I take the maximum value multiplied by 1.1 to add some extra space for the label that shows for the highlighted bars. Note, clearing the selection will set the axis to 340,000 which is a bit more than the largest value in the data, so all bars will be seen at their full value when no selection is made.

Moving around a scatter plot

This is a more experimental idea and probably has limited use in a business context but it might help give you some other ideas of how this feature could be used.

Here, I’m passing values to X and Y start and end axis value parameters – at first, based on a selection and then based on the parameters’ existing values. This allows us to zoom into a scatter plot and then pan around as needed. 

Summary

It’s always good to see new features that allow for more interactivity and end-user control over how a visualisation is displayed. It would be great to see a few improvements to this feature such as being able to dynamically switch between Automatic or Parameter driven axis ranges and also to be able to use calculations as well as parameters. 

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Thanks,
Marc

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