Innovative Tableau

Chapter 9. Viz in Tooltip

One thing I like most about Explain Data is that it visualizes the explanations to help us reduce the time to insight. Essentially, it creates visualizations about the visualizations. Well, as of Tableau 10.5, you can display a visualization (or anything for that matter) within a visualization’s tooltip! With the Viz in Tooltip feature, you can now easily insert entire worksheets into a tooltip by clicking the Tooltip marks card and the Insert button.

This feature is huge for all three of my tenets for good visualization: reducing the time to insight, increasing the accuracy of insights, and improving engagement. Just to name a few applications, it will help save valuable real estate, provide a means for revealing underlying data (see Chapter 76), or you can even use it for company branding (see Chapter 55).

How to Add a Visualization to a Tooltip

To explore this, let’s look at my favorite chart, the noble bar chart, which shows us sales by region:

This is a great chart. We’re able to use the preattentive attribute of length to instantly see insights like the West region is leading the way, and the South is lagging behind the other three regions. The chart is also sorted in descending order, making it even easier for us to compare rank order from top to bottom.

However, this chart is very explanatory, or descriptive, in nature. It’s explaining ...