The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Make sure to check out the other posts in the Level Up series before you go!
Ever wanted to change the size or filters when you put a viz into a Tableau tool tip? In this post, we’ll look at a couple quick ways to customize your viz in tool tip options.
What’s a Viz in Tooltip?
If you haven’t worked with viz-in-tooltip before, good news! You’re about to learn one of Tableau’s coolest features. Here’s how it works.
When you click on the “Tooltip” card, as well as adding fixed text, you have the option to add a sheet.
In this example, I have a bar chart showing 3 types, broken down into different test score categories from 1-5. I’m adding a tooltip that will show the type (A, B, or C), and I’m adding Sheet 2 into the tooltip.
On Sheet 2, I have the average value of the test scores as a text mark. Note that when I added Sheet 2 to the tooltip, a filter was automatically created called Tooltip (Score, Type). That means that the tooltip will show this sheet, but filtered by the score category and type of the section I’m looking at.
You’re not limited to just a text mark on the sheet you’re putting in the tooltip. You can also have tables, bar charts, pie charts, or anything else you might put on a sheet.
Customize the Size of a Viz in Tooltip
Now let’s look at how to customize the viz in the tooltip. The first option you have is to customize the size.
Tableau makes this easy. When you insert a sheet into a tooltip, this segment of code is created. To modify the width and height, all you need to do is edit the maxwidth and maxheight fields. (Note that this only affects the maximum width and height – if the sheet is smaller than those fields, it’ll appear smaller.)
This doesn’t really matter for small text sheets like the one we’re using, but you’ll see this come into play when you’re adding larger visuals, like bar charts with many columns. If you don’t edit the maxwidth and maxheight fields, you’ll get a “Too Large To Display” error in the tooltip.
Change Which Filters Are Applied to a Viz in Tooltip
The other thing you may want to customize is which filters are applied. I’ve mostly come across this issue when using stacked bar charts, or other similar types of visual – I want the viz in tooltip to apply to the whole bar, and not change depending on which section of the bar I’m hovering over.
To change which fields filter your data, adjust the “filter” section of the code. By default, it will say “All Fields”, but you can change this to any field or list of fields you want. In this example, I’ve changed the fields to only filter on “Type”. That means that my tooltip will change between the A, B, and C bars, but won’t change when I switch colored sections on an individual bar – instead, it’ll show me the average for the whole type.
Of course, you’ll probably want to add more detail to your tooltip to make sure it’s clear what you’re showing.
Now you know how to add some basic customization options to your viz in tooltips! Make sure to check out the rest of the level up series before you go, and subscribe in the side bar to get notified of new posts.