So much honored and flattered that my Turing Award Viz is named one of "The Chosen of the Chosen" in Tableau's April Viz Roundup.
It's amazing that Tableau's blog is published in 8 languages. And one thing is sure that they are not using Google Translate. I tested it by using Google Translate to translate the English version to French. The output is like garbage.

The translation of "the Chosen of the Chosen" in most languages is straightforward, ie, Google Translate can do it. However, Chinese translation "精品中的精品" means "The finest of the finest". My favorite expression is in French "La Crème de la Crème" or "The Cream of the Cream". Not surprising for a people deeply in love of gastronomy.

In addition, this article has been selected to be the Best of Tableau Web April 2015:
Dynamic Histogram over Time

I am very grateful to the Tableau community for inspiration and encouragement!
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Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button. 

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

  • Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
  • Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

  • Go to the target dashboard
  • Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
  • Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
  • Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

  • Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager             
  • Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest. 
  • Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.  
  • The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help. 

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