#TweakThursday 35: Placing Labels on Tiled Map Part 2

Just wrote a post on Placing Labels on Tiled Map last week. Again, found that this tiled map has non-aligned labels by Michael Mixon. Otherwise, it is a great viz with very good uses of dual axis, color schemes and drill downs. BTW this viz is part of the #MakeoverMonday week33 project.

Seems like that placing labels in an aligned position on tiled map has been a challenge for many.

We can't use dual axis as described in the previous post, since it's already been used in this viz. We have to find another way.

A close look revealed that the original label was laid on the area chart at year 2009:

• IF MIN([Year]) = 2009 THEN ATTR([US Tile Map].[Abbreviation]) END

The data mark at 2009 is of variable height for different states. This makes the label position variable, thus non-aligned.

Instead, the value of the other axis [% Change since 2003] at year 2003 is invariably zero for all states. So we made the following change:
1.Change the formula to:

• IF MIN([Year]) = 2003 THEN ATTR([US Tile Map].[Abbreviation]) END

2.Move the label to the other axis which is a bar chart.

Now we have an aligned state label for each of the tiles. Click image to view the interactive version.

The key here is to found a common data mark in all tiles, and place the label on it. In case we couldn't find one, we may create one in some way.

To summarize, there seem two options to create labels in tiles:
1. Dual axis: create a single mark measure that's fixed over all tiles.
2.When dual axis is already used, try placing labels in the Label/Text shelf of one data mark, which is common in all tiles.

BTW, made some tweaks to the Zoom window to provide a bit more details.

That's all for this tweak.