# Tableau Tooltips - Full beginners guide including Viz in Tooltips.

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2022-02-07
- **Format:** Video · 2454 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation
- **Tools:** Tableau (dashboards, explain data, filters, formatting, maps, tooltips)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-tooltips-full-beginners-guide-including-viz-in-tooltips
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SuHBoRzfyQ

I walk through everything you need to know about Tableau tooltips, starting with the basics of how they work for free and how to add measures and dimensions to them. I cover formatting using the tooltip editor and the spacing ruler, the command buttons including grouping, sets, Explain Data and view data, and finish with an introduction to Viz in Tooltips and dashboard actions.

## Key takeaways

- Tooltips are generated automatically, but you can add any measure or dimension to one by dragging it onto the Tooltip card in the marks pane, including fields you don't want shown in the visualisation itself.
- Always check the aggregation when adding fields to a tooltip - summing a discount, for example, is misleading, so aggregate at the right level rather than just accepting the default.
- The little ruler at the top of the tooltip editor controls tabbed spacing, letting you align values neatly to the right by inserting tabs and dragging the slider.
- The command buttons let you keep/exclude as filters, create visual groups and sets, run Explain Data for outlier diagnostics, and view the underlying row-level data.
- Viz in Tooltips embeds a sheet inside a tooltip; changing the filter field from 'All fields' to a chosen dimension controls how the embedded chart responds to what you hover over.

## Chapters

- 0:00 What tooltips are and what's coming
- 2:18 Building a scatter plot and the default tooltip
- 4:08 Adding measures and dimensions to tooltips
- 7:36 Watching aggregation when adding fields
- 8:50 Opening the tooltip editor anatomy
- 10:36 Show tooltips: responsive vs on hover
- 11:46 The spacing ruler and tabbed alignment
- 15:47 Formatting for hierarchy and consistency
- 18:25 Command buttons: keep, exclude and filters
- 20:28 Grouping and sets from the command bar
- 23:05 Explain Data in the command bar
- 25:21 Preview and view underlying data

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-tooltips-full-beginners-guide-including-viz-in-tooltips

---
just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena