Using tooltips to show Tableau dashboard Help

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To brand your Tableau dashboard is simple and important. I strongly encourage Tableau developers to appropriately brand their dashboards.

As well as giving your Tableau development team / organisation an identity, it serves a second purpose. It can also provide the user additional information about the dashboard.

Brand your Tableau dashboard

There are different ways to brand your dashboard. One way is to use an image.

Use an image component to brand a Tableau dashboard

One benefit to branding with an image item, it also comes with a URL option. Therefore, if you add the brand as an image, it’s simple to add a URL behind that image.

For example, a user could click on that image and go to your Sharepoint site for a user guide.

Brand your Tableau dashboard using a Brand worksheet

Another option to add your brand to a dashboard is to use a separate worksheet.

Dashboard real estate is valuable and a worksheet offers more options than an image. For example, use the worksheet tooltip to provide Tableau Dashboard Help.

Branding a Tableau dashboard using a worksheet opens up the following possibilities:

  1. URL actions allow the user to navigate to another website
  2. A worksheet has a title. Add information to that space, such as the last update date.
  3. A worksheet has a tooltip. If a user hovers over the brand logo the tooltip can pop up and give additional useful information about the dashboard.

How to creating a Tableau branding worksheet

Begin by adding your brand logo as a custom shape.

To do this find your “My Tableau Repository”. The Tableau menu will tell you where this repository is: Edit—Repository Locale. Often it’s in My Documents.

In the Shapes folder add a new folder for your brand logo and images.

My folder is called TAR Solutions. Put your image(s) into that folder, then it will be usable as a Tableau shape.

Next add your logo to an empty worksheet.

First create a calculated field. This field will give some guidance for the user and also be used for the logo.

The field should only return some text advising the user. In this example the text is “Hover for info:”.

Tabelau calculated field saying Hover for Info text for to brand your dashboard

Change the mark type to a Shape and put the new Logo calculated field on Rows. Click on the Shape box to change the shape to your logo.

Use the Size box to adjust the size of your logo.

Use a share mark type to add the TAR Solutions logo to your dashboard

To tidy this “Hide field label for Rows”, which will remove the word “Logo”. Alter sizing and borders as you see fit.

Bring additional information to your branding worksheet

With a worksheet it’s possible to squeeze in a lot of information.

Add tooltip text to help the users.

Also the title also comes in very useful.

When using Tableau Data Extract I use the title to show the time the data was last updated.

Set the title of the branding worksheet to something useful

For anyone who wants to see how this all fits together, including the tooltip, header and URL action it’s available in Tableau Public.

The dashboard is also below, however Tableau sometimes tweak their Tableau Public URL structure, which could cause this to break.

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