Tableau Viz

VIZ is a tooltip visualization feature added by Tableau in 2017 to increase interactivity while creating worksheets, Dashboard, and Storyboard.

Tableau VIZ allows you to customize the tooltip as per your desire. Revealing them on Selection, Hover. The charts that appear on the tooltip are automatically filtered as per the base chart you select. Previewing and Reset is an option designed keeping in mind the user-friendly aspect of the tableau.

VIZ is a comparatively newer feature hence a lot of learning and understanding can be done through tableau public. Tableau public is a platform where most of the people from the community share their work which helps us open new perspectives about visualization at the tooltip level. We will see a few examples below.

Syntax

• Anything written inside < external call > is like a dependency which could either be from the dimension, measure, parameters, or even the sheet that you would be using to view in the tooltip.
• Anything defined outside as text will be displayed as text on the tooltip

How to Navigate to the Tooltip Section:

The worksheet where you decide to add visualization on the tooltip will be your base worksheet.

In the tableau, every sheet by default has a tooltip value. Which could be edited.

To add new sheets you created for your base worksheet you can navigate like so.

Examples:

1. This example illustrates how to view sales numbers over various categories at the city level.

2. This example illustrates how to view sales numbers over various categories at the state level.

3. This is an example of adding multiple worksheets inside a single tooltip. Below the tooltip editor if you notice there are options like max-width, max-height, Filter

MaxWidth: to adjust the width of the tooltip

MaxHeight: to adjust the height within the tooltip space

Filter: lets you play around with the dimension you want to display.

4. Another way to use Tableau VIZ apart from considering a map as the base visualization is with the tree. When you want to understand figures or growth specific to categories

Tips and notes on using and configuring Viz

• You can use worksheets to create a Viz in Tooltip, but you cannot use dashboards or stories to create a Viz in Tooltip.
• Users will be able to see Viz in Tooltips on the web, but you must configure Viz in Tooltip in Tableau Desktop.
• A Viz in Tooltip is a static image of a targeted view, not an interactive sheet. A Viz in Tooltip cannot have its own Viz in Tooltip.
• You will need a source worksheet visualization and a target worksheet visualization to create a Viz in Tooltip. You will need to create a targeted view to make it available in the Tooltip Editor.
• Use a standard naming scheme for the target sheets you plan to show in tooltips, such as Tooltip: Name of View. Using a standard naming scheme will help you keep track of the views that you are using in tooltips.
• For the target view, consider the size of the view data and how the view will look in the tooltip. You will be able to specify the size for the Viz in Tooltip when you configure it, but you will need to check to see how it is displaying and possibly make adjustments to the view before you publish it.
• Remember that the target view is displayed in the context of the source view. Keeping the target visualization simple can help with performance and reduce cognitive load.
• If you click Show Me in the source sheet and it changes the view structure, all tooltip edits including Viz in Tooltip references will be reset. You will need to reconfigure the Viz in Tooltip.
• One target sheet can be referenced by one Viz in Tooltip source sheet at a time because filters are applied directly to the referenced sheet. When a sheet is already being used as a target sheet in a tooltip, it becomes unavailable for selection in the Tooltip Editor.
• By default, Viz in Tooltip is filtered on All Fields, which considers all fields in the view (at the most specific level of detail) when identifying matching records. You can change the level of detail for Viz in Tooltip by defining a filter on Selected Fields, similar to filtering on Selected Fields in Filter Actions. For related details, see Filtering on Selected Fields does not work across different data sources. If the source and target views are using different data sources, filtering on All Fields will automatically detect the fields in common (if they share the same alias), and filter on them. Filtering on Selected Fields, however, will not work.

You can reach out to me on LinkedIn and GitHub for further discussion.