Introduction
When you apply highlighting to a Tableau view, by default Tableau tends to grey-out all the un-selected marks making them blurred.
See the view below.
(In the above view, the labels have been set to show when the bar is selected or highlighted. However, when that happens the rest of the bars are greyed out rendering them invisible – which is the default way in which Tableau highlighting behaves).
The same applies when you highlight elements in a dashboard as shown below.
(In the above dashboard, all non-Technology categories in the dashboard are greyed out when the technology category is highlighted – which is the default way in which highlighting behaves in Tableau).
How can you correct this behavior?
There is a simple hack that you can leverage to correct this behavior, by creating a simple calculated field called highlighting as shown below.
(This Boolean calculation when added to the detail shelf, is associated with every mark on the visualization – making highlighting to target all marks in the view leaving nothing to be greyed out).
How do you do it? @worksheet level
Drag the calculated field highlighting to the detail shelf.
Go to worksheet menu >> Actions…
Set your highlighting action as shown below.
Note, highlighting any bar in the view doesn’t grey out the unselected bars.
How do you do it? @dashboard level
Drag the calculated field highlighting to every view added on the dashboard (done at worksheet level).
Go to dashboard menu >> Actions…
Set your highlighting action as shown below.
Note, highlighting any marks on the dashboard doesn’t grey out any other marks on the dashboard.
Though we call it disabling highlighting, in the real sense we’re highlighting all marks in the view – which in our eyes looks like disabling highlighting.
Conclusion
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