How to Add Calculated Field in Tooltip in Tableau

Adding a calculated field to a tooltip in Tableau is a simple way to make your visualizations significantly more powerful and informative. It lets you show extra context, conditional details, and deeper insights right when a user hovers over a data point. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create a calculated field and add it to your tooltip to supercharge your dashboards.

Why Add a Calculated Field to a Tooltip?

Before jumping into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." A default Tableau tooltip is useful, showing basic information about the data point you're hovering over. But by adding calculated fields, you upgrade this feature from a simple label to a dynamic insights tool.

Here are a few key benefits:

• Provide Deeper Context: You can display metrics that aren't visible in the main chart. For example, a bar chart might show total sales per region, but the tooltip could reveal the profit ratio, year-over-year growth, or percentage of total for that specific region. This keeps your primary visualization clean while offering richer data on demand.
• Create Dynamic Labels: Calculated fields can use logic to display different text based on the data. For instance, you could create a status field that shows "Profitable," "Unprofitable," or "Break-Even" when someone hovers over a product category. This transforms your tooltip into an immediate analytical guide.
• Enhance User Experience: A well-designed tooltip can tell a more complete story about each data point. It reduces the user's workload by answering follow-up questions immediately, preventing them from having to cross-reference other charts or apply additional filters to get the information they need.

The Quick Guide: Adding a Calculated Field to a Tooltip

If you're already comfortable with Tableau basics, here are the short and sweet steps. If you need more detail, a full step-by-step breakdown with examples follows this section.

1. Create the Calculated Field: Right-click in the Data pane, select "Create Calculated Field," write your formula, name it, and click "OK."
2. Drag to the Marks Card: Find your new calculated field in the Data pane and drag it directly onto the "Tooltip" shelf in the Marks card.
3. Edit the Tooltip: Click the "Tooltip" shelf to open the editor. Your calculated field will be available to insert. You can now format its appearance, placement, and surrounding text.
4. Test It: Hover over a mark in your visualization to see your new, dynamic tooltip in action.

Step-by-Step Tutorial: Adding a "Profit Status" to a Tooltip

Let's walk through a common business scenario. Imagine you have a bar chart showing Sales by Sub-Category, but you also want to quickly see whether each sub-category is profitable or not without adding more clutter to the view. This is a perfect job for a calculated field in a tooltip.

Step 1: Build Your Base Visualization

First, you need a visualization to work with. Let’s use the Sample - Superstore dataset that comes with Tableau.

• Drag Sales to the Columns shelf.
• Drag Sub-Category to the Rows shelf.

You should now have a simple horizontal bar chart. This is the foundation we’ll build upon.

Step 2: Create a Calculated Field for Profit Status

Next, we will create a field that checks if the sum of profit is positive or negative and assigns a text label accordingly. This is a simple IF/THEN statement.

1. In the Data pane on the left, right-click any empty space and select Create Calculated Field…
2. A dialog box will open. First, name your field at the top. Let's call it Profit Status. Coming up with a clear, descriptive name is a great habit to get into.
3. In the main formula box, enter the following logic:

IF SUM([Profit]) > 0 THEN 'Profitable'
ELSE 'Unprofitable'
END

This formula checks the total profit for a given mark (in our case, each Sub-Category bar). If the aggregated profit is greater than zero, it will return the string "Profitable." Otherwise, it will return "Unprofitable."

1. Confirm that the formula is valid (Tableau will display "The calculation is valid." at the bottom).
2. Click OK.

You'll now see your newly created Profit Status field in the Data pane under the Measures section (since it contains an aggregation, "SUM").

Step 3: Add the Calculated Field to the Tooltip Shelf

Now that our calculation exists, we need to tell Tableau to make it available inside the tooltip. This is done via the Marks card.

• Find your Profit Status field in the Data pane.
• Click and drag it onto the Tooltip button in the Marks card.

When you drop it there, the view won’t change, but Tableau now knows you want to use this field when editing the tooltip for this worksheet.

Step 4: Edit and Format the Tooltip

Now for the final step: adding the Profit Status field into the tooltip's text and formatting it for clarity.

1. Click the Tooltip button on the Marks card. This opens the Edit Tooltip dialog box.
2. You’ll see the default text Tableau generates. It's fully customizable. You can type, delete, and format text just like in a basic word processor.
3. Decide where you want your new information to appear. Let's add it at the bottom. Position your cursor there and create a new line.
4. Type a descriptive label, such as Status:.
5. Now we'll insert the field itself. Click the Insert button in the top right of the editor. You will see a list of available fields, including your new Profit (Sum) field. Click on it to add it to your tooltip.

Your tooltip text should now look something like this:

<Sub-Category>
Sales: <SUM(Sales)>
Status: <AGG(Profit Status)>

You can even add formatting to make it stand out. For example, you can select <AGG(Profit Status)> and make it bold.

1. Click OK to save your changes.
2. Now, hover over any of the bars in your chart. The tooltip will appear, showing the Sub-Category, its sales, and its new profit status - "Profitable" or "Unprofitable." Test it out on different bars to see it change dynamically depending on the bar value.

More Advanced Tooltip Examples

Once you've mastered the basic process, you can get creative. The possibilities are nearly endless, but here are a couple of powerful examples to get you thinking.

Example 1: Displaying a Percentage of Total

Sometimes you need to know how a specific segment contributes to the whole. You can use a calculated field to show this as a percentage in the tooltip.

The Calculation:

Create a calculated field named % of Total Sales with this formula:

SUM([Sales]) / TOTAL(SUM([Sales]))

This formula divides the sales for the current mark (e.g., a specific sub-category) by the total sales across the entire pane. After creating the calculation:

• Drag the % of Total Sales field to the Tooltip shelf.
• Go into your tooltip editor and ensure that your new calculation is shown in an engaging informative display like: Contribution to total: <AGG(% of Total Sales)>.
• Format the calculation display. To make those changes, right-click over the calculation and choose the desired format, such as a percentage, from the drop-down menu.

Example 2: Creating a Sentence with Multiple Fields

You can also use calculated fields to build descriptive sentences combining text and measures. This can make your tooltips more conversational and user-friendly.

The Calculation:

Create a calculated field called Tooltip Sentence:

'In this Sub-Category, we made $' 
+ STR(ROUND(SUM([Sales]), 0)) 
+ ' in sales with a profit ratio of ' 
+ STR(ROUND(SUM([Profit])/SUM([Sales])*100, 1))
+ '%'

Let's break this down:

• The formula starts building a string (a line of text).
• STR(ROUND(...)) converts the numerical sales and profit-ratio calculations to text strings, after being nicely rounded. This is necessary because Tableau can't combine numbers and text (string types) within one field like we are doing here.
• Drag Tooltip Sentence to your Tooltips Mark pane. Then add this new calculation to your text via your tooltip editor. You will create a full sentence description that automatically updates, describing the performance data of the data point hovered over.

Final Thoughts

Mastering tooltips by adding calculated fields is a fundamental skill that separates good Tableau users from great ones. It is a straightforward technique for layering rich, contextual information onto your visuals and improving clarity without sacrifice. Give it a try on your dashboards to offer users immediate insights without excessive clicking.

While mastering techniques in Tableau is a valuable skill, there are times you need to glean these insights without manually configuring views or writing formulas. That’s why we built Graphed. You can use simple conversational language to ask for exactly what you'd like visualized - for instance, “show a bar chart displaying sales by each sub-category" or "Create a dashboard analyzing profitability by product category" - and get those requested live visualizations created inside your app. This saves manual building steps and gives more time back for strategy and analysis.