What is a Tooltip in Tableau?

When you hover over a data point in a Tableau visualization, a small box of information that appears is called a tooltip. At first glance, it seems like a minor feature, but a well-designed tooltip is one of the most powerful tools you have for creating dashboards that are clean, interactive, and packed with valuable information. This guide will walk you through exactly what tooltips are, how to customize them, and how to use advanced features like "Viz in Tooltip" to elevate your dashboards.

What is a Tableau Tooltip, Exactly?

A tooltip is a user interface element that appears when you rest your mouse cursor over a "mark" on a Tableau worksheet. A mark can be a bar in a bar chart, a point on a scatter plot, a slice of a pie chart, or a state on a map. Its primary job is to provide more details about that specific mark without cluttering the main view.

Think of it as adding layers to your data story. The main visualization gives the high-level overview, while the tooltip offers the granular detail your audience needs when they want to investigate further. By default, Tableau automatically generates a simple tooltip based on the fields you use in your visualization, but the real power comes from customization.

How Tableau Creates Default Tooltips

Tableau automatically builds tooltips to help you get started quickly. Whenever you drag a dimension or measure onto one of the shelves in the Marks card - like Color, Size, Label, or Detail - Tableau adds it to the tooltip by default. This ensures that the context for your viz is immediately available.

Let's look at a simple example:

1. Connect to the Sample - Superstore dataset that comes with Tableau.
2. Drag the Sales measure to the Rows shelf.
3. Drag the Category dimension to the Columns shelf.

You now have a simple bar chart. If you hover your mouse over the "Technology" bar, you'll see a tooltip that Tableau created automatically. It will look something like this:

Category: Technology Sales: 836,154

This is a great starting point, but we can make it much more informative and visually appealing.

Customizing Your Tableau Tooltips

Customizing a tooltip is straightforward. All the magic happens in the "Tooltip" shelf on the Marks card. Clicking on it opens the Edit Tooltip dialog box, which acts like a small rich text editor.

Let’s improve the tooltip from our simple bar chart by following these steps:

1. On the Marks card, click the Tooltip shelf. The Edit Tooltip window will appear.
2. You’ll see the default text, which includes dynamic placeholders like <,Category> and <,AGG(Sales)>. These placeholders pull the specific values for the mark you hover over.
3. Let's rewrite it to be more conversational and clearer. You can delete the existing text and type your own, using the Insert menu at the top right to add dynamic fields.

Try replacing the default text with this:

This category is <b>,<,Category>,</b>. It has generated a total of <b>,<,AGG(Sales)>,</b>, in sales.

A quick tip: Any text you type directly is static, while the fields in angle brackets (< >) are dynamic.

You can also use the toolbar in the editor to format the text - make it bold, change its color, or adjust the font size to create a visual hierarchy. For example, you could make the sales value larger and a different color to draw attention to it.

Once you click "OK," you have a much more readable (and professional-looking) tooltip. You've gone from a simple data readout to a small sentence that tells a clearer story.

Advanced Tooltip Techniques

Beyond basic text editing, there are several other tricks you can use to make your tooltips even more effective.

Adding More Fields without Cluttering Your Viz

What if you want to show Profit in the tooltip but don't want to add it directly to your bar chart? This is where the Detail shelf comes in handy.

Drag the Profit measure and drop it onto the Detail shelf on the Marks card. Does your bar chart change? Nope. But now, Profit is available to be used in your tooltip.

Go back into the Edit Tooltip dialog box. You can now use the "Insert" menu to add AGG(Profit). Let's update our text once more:

<b>,Category:</b> <,Category> <b>,Total Sales:</b> <,AGG(Sales)> <b>,Total Profit:</b> <,AGG(Profit)>,

Now your tooltip provides sales and profit context, all without changing your core visualization. This is a fundamental technique for adding rich detail on demand.

Command Buttons in Tooltips

At the bottom of the Edit Tooltip window, you’ll see a checkbox for "Include command buttons." Keeping this enabled gives your users powerful interaction options right from the tooltip. The most useful buttons include:

• Keep Only: This filters the view to show only the selected mark.
• Exclude: This hides the selected mark and shows everything else.
• View Data: This opens a window showing the underlying row-level data for the selected mark.

Leaving these enabled empowers a curious user to drill down and explore the data on their own with a single click.

Disabling Tooltips on a Worksheet

Sometimes, a tooltip isn't needed or might get in the way. To disable it, simply click on the Tooltip shelf and uncheck the "Show tooltips" box at the bottom of the window.

The Ultimate Upgrade: Visualizations in Tooltips (Viz in Tooltip)

Perhaps the most impressive tooltip feature in Tableau is "Viz in Tooltip." This allows you to embed an entire worksheet from your workbook inside the tooltip of another worksheet. When you hover over a mark, instead of just seeing text, you see another chart that is automatically filtered to that mark.

This is perfect for showing trends over time, breakdowns by another dimension, or any other related context.

Example: Showing Sales Trends in a Map Tooltip

Imagine you have a map of the United States showing total sales by state. It would be amazing if, when you hover over California, a line chart appeared in the tooltip showing California's sales trend over the past four years. Here's how to build it:

Step 1: Create your "Source" Sheet

1. Create a new worksheet. Let's name it "Sales Map."
2. Double-click the State / Province geographic field to generate a map.
3. Drag Sales to the Color shelf to create a filled map.

This is your primary visualization. When a user hovers over a state, this is where the tooltip will appear.

Step 2: Create your "Target" Sheet

1. Create a second worksheet. Name it "Sales Trend."
2. Drag Sales to the Rows shelf.
3. Right-click and drag Order Date to the Columns shelf. When you drop it, choose the continuous MONTH(Order Date) option (the one with the green calendar icon).

This sheet is a simple line chart showing sales over time. This is the visualization we want to appear inside the tooltip on our map. Make sure the chart is simple and formatted to fit in a small space - you can adjust the sheet size or remove titles to make it cleaner.

Step 3: Connect Them in the Tooltip

1. Switch back to your "Sales Map" sheet.
2. Click on the Tooltip shelf. The Edit Tooltip dialog box opens.
3. Position your cursor where you want the line chart to appear. A new line is usually best.
4. Click the Insert menu and navigate to Sheets > Sales Trend.
5. Tableau automatically inserts a code snippet that looks like this:

<Sheet name="Sales Trend" maxwidth="300" maxheight="300" filter="<All Fields>">

The filter="<All Fields>" part is the critical piece. It tells Tableau to filter the "Sales Trend" worksheet using all the relevant dimensions from the "Sales Map" mark you're hovering over (in this case, the State).

1. You can tidy up the default text and then click OK.

Now, go back to your map and hover over a state like New York. A small line chart will appear within the tooltip, showing only New York's sales trend over time. Hover over Texas, and you'll see the trend for Texas. It's an interactive, layered experience that provides deep context without ever leaving the primary view.

Final Thoughts

Tooltips are far more than just small pop-ups, they are essential for building effective, interactive dashboards in Tableau. By moving beyond the defaults, you can add layers of rich, contextual information, tell a deeper data story, and empower your users to explore the data for themselves - all while maintaining a clean and professional design.

As powerful as custom tooltips are, building effective reports often starts with getting all your data in one place. Manually exporting CSVs from different platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your CRM just to get it into a tool like Tableau is exactly the kind of friction we created Graphed to eliminate. Our platform lets you connect all your marketing and sales data sources in just a few clicks. From there, you can use simple, natural language to explore your data and build real-time dashboards in seconds, not hours.