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7 Golden Rules of Tableau Tooltips

Wednesday 17,
March 2021
Introduction
Most organizations are now heavily dependent on data for growth and are utilizing several visualization techniques.
Better visualizations will lead you to deeper insights into your data. The shadings, fonts, colours, grid lines, alignments,
and borders in your visualization are critical aspects of your data analysis journey and that’s where the tableau tooltip
comes into the picture.
Let’s discover some of the best tooltip practices and how to make the best use of tableau tooltip!
But, first things first:
What is a tooltip in tableau?
A tooltip is anything that appears in the form of text labels when you hover over an element or focus on a particular
object.Tableau Tooltips, therefore, help you to identify or locate elements on either the dashboard or under the workflow
when they’re activated, and it helps in producing cleaner and more appealing visuals.
Tableau tooltips are one of the best ways to add contextual information and data without taking up any space on your
dashboard. Tooltips have other options to generate groups and sets, display marks that have the same value and view
the underlying data. In short, tooltips generate data that is more appealing and informative.
https://www.artofvisualization.com/blog/7-golden-rules-of-tableau-tooltips?utm_campaign... 3/22/2021
Tooltip Tutorial: Exploring And Analyzing Data

Tooltips offer a command section in which you can do many things such as filtering the data, sorting selection, creating a
group, and viewing the underlying data.
Commands which can be used to explore and analyze data for a meaningful visualization are described as follows:
If you want to watch tooltip commands, hover over or click on the data point
(1) Keep Only - Creates a filter that eliminates any remaining information. You can simply select to keep or exclude any specific
data points in your own views.
(2) Exclude - Creates a filter that eliminates the chosen data.
(3) Group Members - Creates a group based on your selection. The choices can contain multiple dimensions, and you can either
aggregate on any one dimension or on all the dimensions.
(4) Create Set (only Tableau Desktop) - This creates another set including all the selected members. You can create another set
under this or edit the same one.
(5) View Data - Under this a newer window pops up sharing the information where you can view the basic or summarized
information.
How To Add A Field To A Tooltip in Tableau?

In the Tableau tooltips, you can include both static and dynamic texts. Furthermore, you can modify or add
customizations to the fields in the automatic tooltip.
1. Move the cursor towards the marks card and select “Tooltip”. Every sheet has a separate specified tooltip and can
be formatted by clicking on formatting tools located on the tooltip dialogue box.
2. By clicking on the insert menu, located on the top of the dialogue box, you can add different dynamic texts like field
values and sheet properties, for example.,
3. The formatting tool can also perform several customization options.
Tooltip Tutorial: 7 Ways of Using Tooltip in Tableau

Tooltips can be often overlooked but they are a very powerful tool in the Tableau arsenal. Hovering over the marks
provides contextual information but the tooltips can perform much more than that. Let’s see some tooltip examples and
advanced tooltips features.
1. Adding a tooltip
1. To add any new tooltip, simply go to the “measure” box and drag a tooltip on the marks card.
1.1 Now move on to the marks bar and click on the tooltip box to edit tooltip. It has got multiple options and
features. For example you can add custom fields, replace original content, or add a description.
2. Formatting tooltips
With a tableau edit tooltip, you can change default labels into the description or human-readable text.
For example the above image shows four elements in their default structure. To make changes to it, click on the tooltip
shelf to start editing, and create a new tooltip. The goal is generally to create a sentence - “In Q1 of 2014, Office Supplies
sales were $xxxxxx”- when we give the graphs and visuals.
Type “In” and cut paste the data in the same field, QUARTER(Order Date). One thing to take keep in mind is that anything
without an angle bracket is considered a string by the tableau tooltip and inside angle brackets, shown as a value or a
field.
Similarly, add the strings in the respective fields, YEAR(order date), SUM(sales), Categorize it onto the dialogue box,
showing the editing tooltip and getting rid of default labels.
Preview the formatted sentence by hovering over the graph or visuals. It should look like this:
3. Tooltip Selection
Like other selection methods in tableau, you can use the tooltip selection as well, to exclude or include certain data fields,
create set groups, and differentiate or divide visuals into various categories.
Let’s see an example by looking at the discrete bar chart. It’s a simple bar chart showing shipping cost, shipping mode,
and every year broken into quarters.
Use the tooltip to select discrete boxes or quarters on the bar chart that we are still using to build the view. Furthermore,
highlight the classes by moving over to the“Standard Class” string, all the orders for Q2, or all the orders for the
mentioned year.
In short, simply click on any attribute to select any other marks with the same value. If at any point you don’t feel the need
to use this option, then uncheck the “allow selection by category” box located on the edit tooltip dialogue box.
4. Command buttons
Command buttons are useful in many situations. They let you create visualizations by keeping or excluding specific
marks or groups of marks, creating sets or groups of data, that are making up that mark.
If you do not want any other person to access all these features, then simply turn off the command button located on the
top of the tooltip shelf and uncheck the “Include Command Buttons” box. You can also play with the “Show tooltips”
options to show tooltips at a faster pace or only when you move over the marks.
5. Actions in tooltips
A link is called an action in the tooltip as it enhances the interactivity of the visualization by filtering, highlighting, or
opening URLs based on where they have been created. Trigger the actions directly by clicking or just going on to the
marks.
6. Images in tooltip
The foremost thing to perform is to get your favorite image and save it in the folder with the mentioned directory: My
documents -> My Tableau Repository -> Shapes to access them in tableau.
Now generate a new tableau sheet and try changing the mark type to shape. Then, click on the “shape” marks card and
map all the images to dimension numbers. Click on the “Edit Shape” option and locate the custom images you have
added to your tableau repository and try matching them with dimension numbers.
Visit the tooltip option in the main menu and import the sheets you’ve created. Now select the sheets and get rid of the
row headers and it’s done. You’ll be able to see those images you’ve just added while hovering over different marks.
7. Dynamic tooltips
Dynamic tooltips help in creating various text styles for different data points whenever you reach them on the base of
certain conditions.
The initial step is to create a calculated field that provides logic on the descriptive text to be shown for each mark. For
example, modifying the logic below according to needed requirements to get a calculated field.
(1)WHEN “condition is true”
(2)THEN “you’ll display this part of the code”
(3) ELSE “some calculated value”
(4) END
Now bring calculated fields into the tooltip and check the ATTR dimension. Now you need to click on the “Insert” option
and add “ATTR” calculated fields into the corresponding tooltip. Now the tooltip should behave according to your logic
while hovering on different marks.
Conclusion
Tooltips are one of the most advanced and best tools to make engaging, contextual, and informative visualizations. The
tool not only brings out an engaging form of visualization interactivity but it’s also an excellent way to manage the entire
workflow or stories without having any clutter while focusing on the relevant data.
Listed above are the best tips and tooltips examples to help you get started with them. Are you still wondering how to
leverage these advanced tooltip features in order to make outstanding and meaningful visualizations in Tableau? Take a
look at our data visualization courses where you'll figure out how to make dazzling visual representations using Tableau.
Besides, if you think this article has helped you with using tooltips then please share it with your friends and also don’t
forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more awesome articles and posts!
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7 Golden Rules of Tableau Tooltips | Blog | Art of Visualization Page 1 of 8

Home Blog Login Get Started

7 Golden Rules of Tableau Tooltips

But, first things first:

What is a tooltip in tableau?

Tooltip Tutorial: Exploring And Analyzing Data

How To Add A Field To A Tooltip in Tableau?

3. The formatting tool can also perform several customization options.

Tooltip Tutorial: 7 Ways of Using Tooltip in Tableau

(1)WHEN “condition is true”

(2)THEN “you’ll display this part of the code”

(3) ELSE “some calculated value”

Mar 10, 2021 Mar 03, 2021 Feb 24, 2021

The Only Place Where Tableau Get Started

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