#TweakThursday 25: Drilling Down on Maps

There is an amazing Viz of the day on 12/20/2016 showing the mortality rate change in USA on certain diseases. Excellently designed!

There are over 3142 counties on each of the 6 maps. I would like to view some of the counties in details. So I added a mechanism to close in. This can be the basis for anyone who wants to add further functionalities.

The steps to do it are:
- drag all the 6 heat maps into a floating vertical container
- create a separate filled map for counties
- add another floating vertical container on top of the above one and drag the filled map to it
- create a button to close the pop-up map.
- create one action filter for pop-up view and another for going back to the original view.

Click the image below to see it in action or download the workbook.

The resulting viz got some small issues. I hope someone can enlighten me:

1.Currently we need to click twice to close the popup map and go back to the original view. I wish I need to click the button (at the top right corner) only once. Maybe we need some action filter wizardry. Anyone can help?

2.In the popup map, if the view is changed, +/- 'ed, then the next time we click on a county in the heat map, the view won't be focused. Need to reset the view to focus.

In the process, I found that 3 counties can't be found in the map. The county names are new while the map data is from 2010. I had to do the following matching:

Petersburg Borough -> Petersburg
Kusilvak Census Area -> Wade Hampton
Sainte Genevieve County -> Ste Genevieve

(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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Vizible Difference

In search of data visualization excellence

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

2. Create an show/hide button

3. Add annotations

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