Innovative Tableau

Chapter 76. How to Show Top 10 Lists in Tooltips

You might have heard the recommendation to provide your dashboard users details on demand. Although I generally agree with the idea of a dashboard flowing from overview—to drill down (or filtering)—to specific details when needed, there can be negative consequences if your end users are too focused on the raw data. Most notably, the raw data does not provide the benefits of data visualization and often means exporting the data from Tableau—stopping the flow of thought dead in its tracks.

One of my favorite ways to provide details on demand is through Tableau’s Viz in Tooltip feature, which I explain in Chapter 9. In this chapter, we set up a sheet containing the detail and add it to the tooltip of an overview or filtered visual. The challenge is that due to the order of operations of Tableau filters, it’s tricky to filter the tooltip to the correct details. This chapter shows you two approaches for filtering a list to the top 10 when it’s being used within a Tableau tooltip. This means that whatever dimension member you are hovering over on a dashboard will display a detailed top 10 list for that specific dimension member.

Displaying Top N Lists Using the Viz in Tooltip Feature

For this tutorial, we use a map showing profit by US state. We set up the tooltips so that when a user hovers over a state, it displays the top 10 products by profit within that state:

First, we need to set up a second sheet that contains the list of top ...