One of the best things about Tableau is the ability to interact with the data that you are looking at – It’s almost as if you can feel, explore and (I hesitate to say)  live the data that is in front of you. This that you can really quickly understand what the data in front of you is saying, and this process is massively aided by Tooltips. And this is my third tip of the week!

Tooltips are often neglected, and usually come under the umbrella of ‘formatting’ which comes after a dashboard or visualisation is completed. This area of Tableau (for me anyway) is always underestimated in terms of the time which it takes to clean up, sort out and unionise the font, the colours and the tooltips in order to keep a level of consistency across the visualisation. Tooltips are automatically populated details of the marks which are in the view that you have created, or are looking at. They’re also a really good visual aid for quick investigation of the data. The beauty? Like a lot of Tableau, it’s customisable. This can mean that Tooltips can be a pivotal part of your visualisation.

Check out my video below which shows a few examples of how you can use tooltips to be really funky, clean and useful to the end user;