Viz in Tooltips, a long waited Tableau feature
Last week, during the Tableau Vision Keynote at #Data17, Francois Ajenstat, Tableau’s Chief Product Officer announced that Tableau 10.5 Beta was available to download. Some amazing new features are included on this release such as Hyper a super fast data engine, Maestro for data preparation, API Integration and my favourite one, Viz in Tooltips !
I have been waiting for this feature since I downloaded Tableau for the first time in July 2013, so you could imagine the smile on my face when Francois confirmed Viz in Tooltips will be part of Tableau 10.5.
I couldn’t help myself and went straight into Tableau’s Pre-Release Program website to download 10.5 beta – http://tableau.com/getbeta – and after a very simple and straight forward update, 10.5 was running on my Macbook.
Viz in Tooltip gives users the ability to build and interact with visualizations that progressively reveal additional details about their data.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">A long waited <a href="https://twitter.com/tableau?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@tableau</a> feature ... "Viz in Tooltips" now available on 10.5 Beta ! - It is simply awesome ! - <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Tableau?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Tableau</a> thank you so much !!! <a href="https://t.co/T7NeUas9vf">pic.twitter.com/T7NeUas9vf</a></p>— Pablo Gomez (@PabloLGomez) <a href="https://twitter.com/PabloLGomez/status/918130264592789504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 11, 2017</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
As users hover over a mark, additional details-on-demand are displayed within its tooltip. This feature encourages users to engage with their data at a deeper level and maximizes the space available for the primary visualization.
How to do it?
It is actually very simple and straight forward and here are three simple steps:
1- Create your main viz
In my example, I created a simple Sales by State map using Sample-Superstore.
2- Create tooltip vizzes
Create one or more sheest with the vizzes that will go into your Tooltip. In my example, a simple table with sales, discount, quantity and profit figures for all four years. The second viz is a sales by month line graph.
TIP: Keep your workbook tidy and give your sheets a proper name!
3- Add vizzes to tooltip
Click the Insert menu in the Tooltip Editor. In the Insert menu, select Sheets, and then select a target sheet. The markup for the Viz in Tooltip is automatically added.
<Sheet name=”Year Sales” maxwidth=”300″ maxheight=”300″ filter=”<All Fields>”>
By default, the Viz in Tooltip is filtered on All Fields (filtered on all fields possible, and on the most specific level of detail).
Click OK.
Change the size of the Viz in Tooltip
You can manually change the maxwidth and maxheight values to resize the Viz in Tooltip. The default size is 300 by 300 pixels. To change the size, manually replace “300” with another value. If you need to set the value greater than 600 pixels, you might want to reconsider whether the target view is a good candidate for Viz in Tooltip.
In the source sheet, click the Tooltip button in the Marks card to open the Tooltip Editor. Select the number value for maxwidth and maxheight and type a different value to replace it. For example:
<Sheet name=”Year Sales” maxwidth=”500″ maxheight=”500″ filter=”<All Fields>”>
Change the filter for the Viz in Tooltip
By default, Viz in Tooltip is filtered on All Fields (filtered upon all fields in the current view, at the most specific level of detail). You can change the level of detail for Viz in Tooltip by defining a filter on selected fields, similar to filtering on Selected Fields in Filter Actions.
- In the source sheet, click the Tooltip button in the Marks card to open the Tooltip Editor.
- Place your cursor within the filter value (
filter="<place cursor here>"), and then click the Insert menu to select an available field. Or, manually replace the <All Fields> value with the name of a field in the view. For example:
<Sheet name="Year Sales" maxwidth="500" maxheight="500" filter="<name of field>">
Can and Can’t do of Version 1 …
- Viz in Tooltip is a static image of a visualization, not an interactive sheet. Tableau will continue investigating interactive functionality for a future release.
- Viz in Tooltip can be viewed on the Web, but can only be configured in Tableau Desktop. Tableau will support web authoring in the future.
- In V1, only sheets can be displayed in a tooltip. Tableau will continue to work on Viz in Tooltip and will look into supporting Dashboards in a future release.
Viz in tooltips is really cool. I tried myself and it looks very neat. Great article!