Today (6/22/2016)'s Tableau Viz of the Day presents an overview of the USA presidential election results from 1916 to 2012. This is the 2nd #VOTD in last few days following Matt Chambers's fantastic small multiple design on the same topic, to which I did some tweak to add visual tooltips.
Today's viz is very well designed based on heat maps. Especially, the author Jacob Olsufka has put in great effort in designing the tooltips with various colors, strings, conditional calculations etc. I appreciate deeply how much he cared about using tooltips to convey key information.
The tooltips have a few important numbers about the candidates of democrats, republicans and independents. Here we can further create visualizations for them. Based on an old trick, here is what I got:
It is simple and effective. Click the image to go to the interactive workbook.
(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.)
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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