Innovative Tableau

Chapter 56. 3 Innovative Ways to Use Tooltips: Tip 2

How to Add a Tooltip to a Dimension

Tableau tooltips are one of the best tactics for providing context to a data visualization without taking up valuable real estate on the visualization itself. By default, Tableau tooltips can be added only to measures, but what if you want to provide additional information about text on a row or column header?

The following trick allows you to display the definition of the dimension members on your view when a user hovers over them. This has several practical benefits, such as:

• It helps your end users understand the dimensions in the flow of the analysis.
• It’s more intuitive to display information about the dimension on the dimensions themselves.
• It improves focus by saving real estate in the measure tooltips.

How to Display Definitions in Tooltips of Discrete Dimensions

Let’s imagine that our business use case is to make the following bar chart showing the Sales and Profit Ratio measures by the Segment and Ship Mode dimensions:

By default, if I hover over any of the bars, I see a tooltip:

However, if I hover over a dimension member on one of the row headers, I see nothing:

But what ...