Georgia Chen created a tiled map for a recent #MakeoverMonday project. She had a hard time placing the labels on the tiles. And she ended up doing it manually. Yes, you can drag and drop the labels to a place manually.
Tiled map is often used chart type, which is a kind of small multiples. In a tiled map, there is always a label in each tile to indicate the actual location or the category of the tile.

How to place the label at a desired position? The general approach is to
- create a single mark chart at a desired position.
- put the label on the mark
- dual axis with the existing chart.

Georgia already used dual axis to place a colored arrow at the end of line chart. I moved the arrow to the label using a number formatting technique. So I saved the dual axis for later use.

Position the tile label
Each tile here represents a state (or a union territory) in India. Note that the horizontal axis is year, and the vertical axis is a percentage. To place the label at the upper center, I created a measure [Mark] as follows:
  • IF [Year]=2014 THEN 0.8 END
This will place the mark at year 2014 and at the height of 80%. We select white color to hide the data mark so that it is not visible. Last, place State (Group) on the Label shelf.

Aggregate the measure Avg(Mark)
The dimension State (Group) is being used instead of State because of recent state readjustment. Andhra Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh (New) are grouped together. Sum(Mark) would have produced 1.6. We need to use Avg(Mark) to keep the mark at 80%

Dual Axis and synchronize
Place Avg(Mark) at the Row shelf. Dual axis with the main measure. Sync the scale with the main axis. We get the labels in the desired place.
Voila the tweak of the week.
0

Add a comment

(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. 

0

Add a comment

Blog Archive
Loading
Dynamic Views theme. Powered by Blogger. Report Abuse.