[ An update on this topic has been posted: Creating Visual Tooltips Anywhere ]

Text tooltips could be a little dull. With visual tooltips, we have more options for data visualization. Drilldown is one of the easy options.

In the Tableau Ambassador 2016 viz, by hovering mouse on a person's picture, you will see a bigger picture and details.
My fellow Tableau Ambassador Rody Zakovich asked me to write about it. I am so obliged.
To illustrate the technique, I came up with a simple example. Please click the picture below to view the interactive version.
Here are the major steps for creating the visual tooltips in the above example:

1.Create a bar chart for the sales in 2011-2014, based on the superstore data set.

2.Create one tooltips sheet for the year 2011, which shows breakdowns in product category.
- Create a filter Year2011 and select True after putting it on the filter shelf.
- Duplicate the sheet 3 times for the years 2012-2014 with some change in the filters: Year=2012,2013,2014 etc. Namely one tooltips sheet per year. Note that the filters are mutually exclusive. Only one of the filters will be true at one time.

3.Start a new dashboard and put the bar chart on it. Remove the title and legends for simplicity.

- Drag each of the tips chart (in Floating mode) to the dashboard and place it near the bar of the same year.

4.Create a dashboard action with filter by hovering. And select the "Exclude All Values" when clearing all the selections.
Voila, we just built a dashboard with visual tooltips. This technique was used in creating this Ambassador viz. I got the inspiration from a VizWiz article on sheet popping.

The tooltips charts don't have to be uniform. Since each tips chart is independent of the others, we can use a different chart for each year. See example 2 in the viz.

Caveats:
1.The data marks under the tooltip sheets won't be sensitive to mouse hovering. So the tooltip sheets have to be carefully positioned.

2.The technique is suitable for dashboards with relatively sparse data marks.

3.The positions of the visual tooltips are fixed.

4.When one data mark is hovered upon, all tooltips' frames will be lighted up briefly. It is a transitional effect. If possible, lay the tooltips sheets on top of each other like in the Ambassador viz, a way to minimize the effect.

5.The regular tooltips may co-exist or they can be turned off.

There have been other options to put visual charts directly within Tableau's tooltips.
http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/barsintooltips
This VizWiz guest post by Rody Zakovich is also a great example:
http://vizwiz.blogspot.com/2016/03/tableau-tip-how-to-create-100-mark-unit.html

In the last Tableau conference in Oct. 2015 at Las Vegas, we have seen a demo on showing charts in the tooltips. So what I got here might be short lived. But it will remain an alternative for creating great dashboards.

For the impatient, you can have it today or even yesterday as shown above.

Last but not the least, I would challenge you to come up with vizzies using the technique described here. Let me know in the comments if you wish.

Enjoy Tableau.
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  1. You're too generous by far . Good stuff .

    ReplyDelete

  2. nice work.....any idea if Tableau 10 will have this built in ? its not in the T10 Beta 1 that was release a few days ago.

    ReplyDelete

(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)

Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau.

(Addendum: Jonathan Drummey has a much better Tableau-only solution that I missed from his presentation. I only caught later part of the presentation.

[Forward: I asked ChatGPT o1-mini who then wrote this. Hope it helps. All the credit and the blame go to ChatGPT.

I went over the plan and it looked decent. Whether it can be done in 30 days or not, it depends on the person and the time he spends on it.

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A while ago, Sharon came to me asking a question regarding Pareto Chart Multiples. That is, per each category, there is a Pareto chart. And we need to create Pareto charts for all the categories.

[Update: The product manager Wilson Po alerted me that the Viz Extension is still a work in progress. It will not be part of the incoming version 2024.1. Instead, it will be released later in 2024. Just be patient]

Tableau 2024.1 is coming. I got a chance to test drive it.

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I just put the images into a tiled map in Tableau. Each image is added as a background in each tile.

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The folks at Business Expert had a brilliant idea. They asked AI's perception on UK banks as a dog. I am inspired to do the same on US banks.

ChatGPT is asked to confess its perceptions on top US banks as a dog. Then Midjourney is tasked to generate the images.

Through my previous post on the new Sankey chart type, I got in touch with Wilson, the product manager leading the development of this new chart type. I made some comments on creating multi-level Sankey via cascading of single Sankey's.

As an enthusiastic user of Sankey charts, I am excited to learn that a Sankey chart type is being piloted in Tableau Public (Web Edit only). I wrote about Sankey chart design in multiple posts. Sankey chart may appear in different forms depending on applications.

Just came across a report by Reuters on USA-China gap widens between respective internet giants. The report includes a text table. The caption says the table columns can be sorted. But it is a static image. (They retracted the table after I reported the issue.)

It picked my interest.

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In the process of creating a dashboard on the US Travel Advisory 2023, I found some mismatches in a few regions in two countries.

Gaza Strip

One is Gaza Strip in Palestinian Territories. In the latter, there are two regions: Gaza Strip and West Bank.

This is a follow up post to Fiscal Calendar Calculations Cheatsheet for Tableau.

Excel is a very important tool for data analysis and calculations. It's also an important data repository for Tableau.

Week-based calendars are used in many companies as their fiscal calendars. The total weeks in a fiscal year is 52 weeks, that is, 364 days. Each quarter has 13 weeks. There are 3 varieties of 13 weeks: 5-4-4, 4-5-4 and 4-4-5 weeks per quarter. In leap years, there are 53 weeks or 371 days.

Christine suggested me to have a look at Simpson's Paradox, following my recent posts on Anscrombe's Quartet and Datasaurus Dozen. They are all about learning to look at statistics in an impartial way.

#TweakThursday: From time to time I tweak someone else's public viz and try to make it better to my subjective view.

This post is about 13 data sets, known as Datasaurus Dozen, that have the same stats and different distributions. Stats can be deceiving while data visualization can makes a big difference.

Francis Anscombe, a British statistician and a professor at Princeton and Yale, constructed 4 different sets of data which all have the same stats, known as Anscombe's quartet. However the quartet's data distributions are quite different. 

Stats alone can be deceiving.

In a single day, I am asked twice the same question: how to install database drivers for Tableau in Mac? The question of the day is regarding the drivers for Presto and PostgreSQL databases. The docs online may not answer the question exactly.

There are always more than one ways to skin a cat. In Tableau, there is always one more way to design the same chart. Mastering them will give us more options to satisfy the various requirements we may be asked for.

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I almost named the post as Charting "Top N and Others" via Post-filtering. Read on to understand why.

Visualizing "Top N and Others" is an often required business use case. A popular solution is by creating a top N set. That's the one I have been using through the years.

Angel works in Finance. She often asks me questions on calculations in a table. Today I got this question: How to calculate Year over Year (YoY) change ratios for both quarterly and yearly sums, in a single sheet?

Here is the solution we got. First there are two parts for the YoY calculation.

Just came back from Tableau Conference 2022 at Las Vegas. What an exciting event! The most exciting thing is reuniting with old friends and meeting with the datafam people known online for years.

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A little enhancement in the formula editor can make a big difference for whose who create formula all the time in Tableau. Here are my wishes for a future editor. 

Highlighting Syntax Words

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For the sake of uniformity in a bar chart, we may need to filter out dates in the latest partial week, month, quarter or year. That is what Parinita asked me about a filter to do just that.

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In my previous post on labeling trellis chart, I only showed how to label at the top left corner. People like Chipo Chirewa may want to label elsewhere.

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[Sequel to this post: Labeling Trellis Chart Anywhere]

To many people, the most difficult part of creating a trellis chart is to label it. Especially labeling it in the same sheet and with sparse data is even harder.

1

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We will use customized grand total technique to calculate it.

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Note first that here I loosely define data densification as what includes both interpolation and extrapolation of data marks as well as their associated values.

[ This is a guest post by Hans Romeijn. This is a followup post to my recent post on calculating YTD/YoY, QTD/QoQ, MTD/MoM and WTD/WoW. Hans shows a practitioner's approach to the calculation with performance in mind.

I was asked a question: How to find out the IDs that showed up consecutively 5 times during the last 14 days?

How would you solve it?

Here I came up with 2 solutions. The 2nd one is a little simpler.

1

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I found a solution to it, which is as follows.

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Here is an example. Given a simple bar chart by category.

Subtitle: Sunburst Chart with Labels Inside and Categorical Sequential Colors

Here I am presenting how to design Sunburst Chart with practical considerations, such as:

Labels insideCategorical sequential colors with dynamic data.The design will be based on map layers, a new feature since Tableau d

[ Followup guest post by Hans Romeijn: Calculating Period-To-Date/PoP with Indicators for Better Performance ]

Year to Date (YTD) and Year over Year (YoY) calculations are very important in business dashboards. Jim Dehner recently wrote a great post on the topic.

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