Tableau viz in tooltip is a really cool feature that I am going to start incorporating more into my dashboards. Actions are already an excellent way to drill down into a viz, but now Tableau allows you to drill down into a viz without a chart even being on your dashboard. How cool is that? I am all about maximizing space, so this is great. If you do it correctly, you can get some pretty powerful insight using this feature.
The feature is surprisingly straightforward to do, the harder part will be figuring out what you want to put in your tooltip and what makes the most sense. In this blog, I will show you 4 different examples of viz in tooltip with each of them having a little twist. After reading this, you will be able to incorporate it into your dashboards and create some real insightful drill-downs as well as learning some Tableau viz in tooltip tips.
FREE DOWNLOAD: Don't leave empty handed, download the Tableau Viz in Tooltip Reference Guide to take with you. It has all the examples and tricks you need on a 1 page PDF.
Basic Viz in Tooltip
The steps for putting a Tableau viz in tooltip filter are pretty straightforward. You first create the main visualization that will have the tooltip. Then you create the supporting viz that will go in the tooltip. Then you will put it in the tooltip and customize it as you choose. Let’s go ahead and look at a basic example.
Create Main Viz
The first thing we have to do is create the primary visualization. This will be the viz that will appear on your dashboard, nothing new here.
Create Tooltip Viz
Now looking at you main viz think about what information people will want to know about the data points in your viz that are not currently present. When looking at this viz, my thought was I would like to know how this data is trending over time for each country. So I created a simple line chart keeping it really clean by not keeping the headers or labels on it.
Add to Main Tooltip
Now that I have my tooltip chart created I go back to my main viz and click on the Tooltip box. Once I am in the Edit tooltip dialog box, I then click Insert Sheets then select the chart I want to add to my tooltip. From there I can format my text and click ok. Now go ahead and hover over a mark to see how it looks
2 Charts Stacked on Top of Each Other
Now we got the basics out the way lets go over a few more examples of how this can be used. The viz in tooltip feature is not constricted with just 1 viz. You can put as many as you want. In this example, we are going to stack 2 visualizations on top of each other. This is the same process as before, but this time we will insert 2 sheets in the tooltip right on top of each other. When creating this, just think how the viz in tooltip filtering will work when hovering over the mark.
Formatting and Drill Down with Enlarge Action
In this example, we are going to play with some of the formatting options and also create a drill down action. The first thing we are going to do is create the viz we want in the tooltip and put that in a dashboard by itself.
Before adding it to our main viz, this time we are going to add a border below the text by creating another worksheet that will be blank other than keeping just a row divider (option to change color and weight). Adding some Tableau viz in tooltip formatting can really make things pop.
Now go ahead and go back to your main viz and add it to your tooltip right below your text. As you see you have a few options to adjust the max width and max height of your worksheet. All you have to do is change the values in the quotations, and the tooltip will update. In this example we want the max height to be 9 which is lowest Tableau will accept.
Now let’s go ahead and put both worksheet in separate dashboards so we can add our action to it. Once it’s in the dashboard go ahead and go to Actions, Add Action, Filter and following the following steps.
1. Select your main sheet as your source sheet
2. Change your Target sheet to the dashboard you created by selecting it in the drop-down menu.
3. Run action on Menu
Now go ahead click ok and hover over one of the points on the dashboard. Once you do so you should see a hyperlink at the bottom of your tooltip which once clicked will jump you to the other dashboard with a viz that is in your tooltip blown up.
Charts Side by Side with Sentence Formatting
The last example I am going to show you is a cool way to create a dynamic sentence and put 2 charts side by side. The first thing we need to do is create the 2 charts that will be in the tooltip. Once done, go to the main viz and open up the tooltip box. The trick here is we are going to use the border sheet we made previously to set the max size of the entire tooltip. So here we insert the border sheet and change the max width to 600 and maxheight to 9 again.
Now we insert the 2 charts under that with a max width half of what we put the max width at which is 300. Now when adding the sheets make sure to set the text right next to each other as 1 paragraph, no space or break between them. From there we can update the text above by mixing text and dimensions/measures. The end should look similar to this…
These are just a few examples of viz in tooltips that could be used. You should be able to think of a way to use this in every dashboard to add interactivity. Just keep in mind to make things simple and meaningful. While creating this blog I came across a lot of different resources that I put together in a reference list. It has all the best examples and tricks that I found while doing research on this topic. If you interested in checking it out you can download it for free below. If you have any cool examples of a viz in the tooltip, please add it to the comments for all of us to see!
FREE DOWNLOAD: Don't leave empty handed, download the Tableau Viz in Tooltip Reference Guide to take with you. It has all the examples and tricks you need on a 1 page PDF.
