Small multiples has been very effective in comparing multiple dimension members. It shows us a tiny chart for each member. In a glance, we can see the general contrast between members.

However, those small multiples are really small. Users may want to see a larger chart, or drill down into one of the small charts. By adding visual tooltips to the small multiples, we give users the option to enlarge the charts and see more details, thus drill down. We found that the visual tooltips complement small multiples very well.

We are going to show two examples here on adding visual tooltips to small multiples. One is based on Jim Wahl's Tableau rendering of a Washington Post's graphics. It resurfaced in Linkedin because of Tableau Zen Master Kelly Martin's recommendation.
Another is based on Tableau Ambassador Matt Chambers' recent viz.
Click the above pictures to view or download the interactive workbooks.

The main steps to add visual tooltips to the above dashboards are as follows:
1. Duplicate the main chart and name it as ToolTip. Make changes to the design for detail viewing. It may look crowded initially. After filtering by action filter, it will look fairly decent.

2.Drag a vertical container in Floating mode into a new dashboard canvas.

3.Drag the tooltip chart to the vertical container in Tiled mode and set it to Entire View.

4.Set up the action filter with appropriate dimensions on the main chart that filters the tooltip chart. Run action on Hover and Exclude all values when the hovering is cleared.
5. Some of the functions won't work until you publish it to the server. (There is a curious discrepancy between desktop and server.)  The part that won't work in desktop is when hovering over the area overlaid with the tooltip chart. But it works on the server.

Voila, that's all.

You will have a single tooltip sheet for all the small multiples. You can have as many tooltips as you wish though, even one tooltip sheet per member as shown in some of my earlier posts.

Enjoy Tableau.

(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. 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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