Why Vizioneer?

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Atlanta, Georgia, United States
The "Vizioneer" comes from mashing two words that have shaped my world for most of my adult life - Engineer and [data] Visualizations (or Vizes to those who know what's up). Graduating from first from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, followed by Georgia Tech with my Bachelors and Masters in Civil Engineering, all of which taught me to think through anything and everything - problem solving, "engineering" solutions, teaching to the "ah ha" moments - is what I love to do. In 2010 that investigative, engineering mindset intersected a job change and a plunge into the world of Data Analysis. In the search for the next great thing I stumbled on to a data visualization and dashboarding product called Tableau software and things just took off. So now I guess you could call me that engineer with the sweet data visualizations - or just "The Vizioneer" :)

In 2013, I joined the incredible team at Slalom, focusing on Tableau and it's been an amazing experience. Recently in 2014, I was honored and humbled to receive Tableau's highest recognition of being named a Tableau Zen Master. Follow along to see what happens next :)

Friday, April 25, 2014

Day 25: Hover for Info

I want to begin today by thanking everyone who came out to the Atlanta Tableau Users Group yesterday.  I had the opportunity to present six of these Tricks and Hacks to the Atlanta Tableau Community and had some really great feedback.  The Slalom Atlanta hosted Happy Hour that followed didn't hurt either - awesome event!  

 While at the ATUG Event yesterday, our fearless leader Andy Piper was showing off the ATUG Tableau Public submission to the User Group contest that's going on.  He showed how he had hid the important info of the dashboard by making it appear when the user hovered over an icon.  To my surprise, there were a number of people in the room that got really interested in how he did that.  So this is a very quick trick how to create a Hover for Info Button.

First off we need a button, a graphic that jumps out and get your attention and says "Hey! Over here!  I have information that you need!"  To Google Images we go...














Something like one of these - don't pick something annoying, but don't pick something that's going to blend into the background.  Save it as a .png, and hop over to the shapes folder in My Tableau Repository (My Documents>>My Tableau Repository>>Shapes), create a new folder and call it "Info".  

 Now pop open Tableau and we're going to create this hover button for an existing dashboard. In just the same way that we created some of the other buttons previously,  we're going to start by taking the calculated field "One" (=1), putting it on the columns shelf, and changing it to a dimension (getting rid of the Sum).  We've done this a few times now so I'm sure you're getting the hang of it.  You should be here:




















Click on Shape and go through the folders until you find the folder "Info" that you just created.  























Can't find it? Hit the Reload Shapes button highlighted below:
























Alright your shape has now change to this info icon.  Now for the trick.  After a little formatting clean up, click on the tooltip button and type in what ever you want.  Here's what I did:




















Now, once that's all done, we'll bring this sheet on to a dashboard so that when the user hovers they'll see that text appear.  This works really well when you need to include detailed instructions for a first time user, but don't want to sacrifice space on the dashboard for it.  And here's the final product on top of the "Day 21: Is it Me" dashboard:

That's it! Thanks again for stopping by.  The countdown continues!  5 to go!

 Nelson




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2 comments:

  1. UnknownMarch 29, 2018 at 3:55 PM

    Question on info icon texts: Can they be parameterized similarly to dynamic text boxes? I have a case that I'd like to display slightly different info texts depending on the filtering being applied in the dashboard (different definitions of what the benchmarking is depending on the slicing of data). Possible?

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  2. lost_in_woodsJuly 10, 2019 at 2:38 AM

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    ReplyDelete

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