Help with Drill Actions

[lauratilton]

I'm trying to wrap my head around the Drill Actions feature in Looker Studio. I don't really want to drill down, I just want to use the value in a table to filter the table, so I don't have to add a separate filter control.

Suppose I have a table with two fields, Name and City. I want to just be able to click on a Boston record using Drill Actions and display only the Boston records. I'm not really drilling down, in the way we might go from State to City or something like that. The only way I seem to be able to get it to do this is to put the City field into the Drill Action twice, like this.

Here's a sample report if you want to see how that works. But it seems very clunky. Am I not understanding this feature? 

[CDHankinson]

1. click "drill actions"
2. click "apply" without adding any fields

this achieves your end goal as described.

[lauratilton]

Thanks for the reply @CDHankinson! Unfortunately, this doesn’t work, which is why I’m posting here! It seems like it should work, but it doesn’t. 

[hsu_r]

If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want to be able to drill down only on the city "Boston"? There's a couple of different ways that you can do this, from my understanding:

1. Using control fields like the dropdown (and have your choices be cities) or the search bar control.

2. If you want to do it by "Drill Actions", you can set your dimension in your table to City (which you already have), and then add Name as the field in your Drill Down. When you hover over a record for Boston in your table, "Drill Actions" will appear, click on that and then you will see a switch button that will say Filter on "Boston", and that will apply your records to only "Boston". 

[dylantrose]

Hey lauratilton,

(It looked like there's a bit of confusion in this comment section maybe so I took a look.)

I believe you are understanding this feature. It is a bit awkward in that if you do enable the drill down and only have the original field, it doesn't seem to let you complete the drill down unless you duplicate the field in the entry.

If I'm understanding correctly, what you want is for the ability to drill down kind of like a chart would, such as when you click a tree chart it drills into the field.

I definitely second this, the way to get this work now, at least the way you've shown, is a bit jank.

However, to be fair, it does work as intended when you do add the second (duplicate) field, and I doubt most general users will even know to use drill down without some instruction anyways.

Sincerely,

Dylan

[lauratilton]

Thanks for the reply. Glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks this is a bit "jank" even though it does seem to work.

Laura