Vizzes in tooltips in Tableau 10.5

During the Devs on Stage keynote at the Tableau Conference in Las Vegas (next year will be in New Orleans if you want to book your ticket already), one of the most exciting new features was announced for the next version of Tableau 10.5: the possibility to add visualizations in tooltips. Even better, you can try and have a play with this new functionality in the Beta version that is already available.

How to add a viz in a tooltip?

So the key question: sounds great but, how I do it? Very easy, you just need to follow the next three steps.

Step 1: Create the main visualization

By the main visualization I mean the one you want to include in your dashboard and hover over the different marks to see the additional visualizations in the tooltip. As an example, I’m going to visualize the profit by State on a map using the Superstore data available in Tableau.

Step 2: Create the visualization you like to show in the tooltip

Now we have to build the visualization we want to see when hovering over the main one. For now, we don’t need to add anything, just create a new visualization in a different sheet as usual. Let’s say I want to see the profit by sub-category when I hover over each of State on our map. For instance, something like the next image.

Step 3: Add the secondary visualization to the tooltip of the main one

Now I have to go back to my main visualization and click on the tooltip as if I was going to modify it as we normally do. In the top right section of the tooltip window, we have the Insert menu where we can click and add the name of the data source, workbook, any parameter or any dimension/measure that is in the level of detail of our visualization. But now in 10.5, there’s an additional option at the top of that menu named sheets where we can choose the visualization we want to add to our tooltip. In our example, I want to include the Profit by sub-category sheet.

And that’s it! Now when you hover over a State, you will see in the tooltip the profit by sub-category (the second sheet we have created) automatically filtered for that State.

If we go back to our second sheet (profit by sub-category) we will see that Tableau automatically has created a new filter in our sheet similar to a Set filter: the Tooltip filter.

Additional options

Also, if we look at the tooltip of our main visualization now, we will see that Tableau has automatically added some details there. Something like:

<Sheet name=”Profit by sub-category” maxwidth=”300″ maxheight=”300″ filter=”<All Fields>”>

In fact, we can also modify the maxwidth and maxheight numbers and change how the visualization looks like in our tooltip. Even better, we can also add more than one visualization in our tooltip. For instance, we can create a new sheet showing the profit by quarter, add it also to the tooltip, add some text to look like the title of the sheets, modify the maxheight of the profit over time sheet we just added to 100, and get a tooltip that looks like this:

When I add the map to a dashboard, I can see that the profit in Colorado has decreased during the last quarters and that Tables, Bookcases and specially Machines are the most unprofitable sub-categories. And I still have a lot of free space in the dashboard to add additional analysis.

Pablo Sáenz de Tejada

London, UK