After I posted an article yesterday on seamless sheet swapping, I remembered I had found something interesting a while ago regarding the sheet swapping of packed bubble chart. The problem was that, one can't filter the packed bubble chart completely using the sheet selector.

The cause of the problem is due to no pills on Rows/Columns shelves. These are the gridless chart types. The solution was to add some "Blank" dimensions to Rows/Columns and thus the problem got fixed. Remember to right click the Blank dimension and un-check "Show Header".
Click this picture to go to the interactive version.
As sheet swapping gets popular, similar problems came up often:

The above technique applies to all the chart types with no rows/columns pills: Packed Bubble, Pie and Treemap etc.

Note that in this thread, Zen Master Jonathan Drummey mentioned that he has long found the issue and its solution. He even posted an idea in as early as 2011, which still remains active:

Hope this idea gets implemented one day. Before that day, we have to live with the above tricks.
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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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