Tableau Server: Drill Down and Up in a Hierarchy

You have probably discovered how to drill down and up within a hierarchy such as a relational date field or a multidimensional hierarchy. For example, when you drag a Date field to a shelf it displays at the default date level such as Year. You can click the plus and minus buttons on the left side of a field to drill up or down within a hierarchy to more levels like Quarter, Month, Day, and so on.

But what if you are using Tableau Server? Did you know that when you look at a view on Tableau Server you can drill down within a hierarchy even though you don't see the fields and shelves like you do in Tableau Desktop?

On Tableau Server, when you hover over members of a field in the view, the familiar plus and minus buttons show up. Clicking the plus or minus drills down and up in the hierarchy.

For example, below is a text table showing Profit and Sales over time by region and product category. Let's say you wanted to see how the numbers break down by month within each quarter. When you hover over the Quarter headers a small plus button appears in on the left. Click the plus button to drill down to show Months.

The view expands to show the numbers for each month within the quarter.

Now let's say instead you would rather see everything aggregated up to years. You can hover over the Year headers and click the minus button that displays on the left.

The report contracts to show just yearly numbers.

You must be assigned the Interactor license level and be allowed the View Underlying Data capability to drill down and up in a view on Tableau Server. Contact your Tableau Server Administrator to find out if this kind of interaction is available to you.