Did you know there is more than one setting for displaying tooltips?

The default setting, Responsive, triggers the tooltip immediately upon hovering the mouse over the mark in the visualization.

This default setting can be adjusted to Hover, which introduces a slight delay before the tooltip appears. Choosing Hover instructs Tableau to pause briefly before displaying the tooltip popup. This option is particularly useful in visualizations with numerous marks, such as a busy scatterplot, where the Responsive setting may inundate users with tooltips popping up instantly as the mouse moves across the screen.

To switch to the Hover setting, simply click on the dropdown menu within the Tooltips editor box.

But wait, there’s more! There’s a third method to activate tooltips, which I’ve nicknamed “Click Action Tooltips”. This approach involves utilizing a parameter, a handful of calculations, and dashboard parameter actions. Once implemented, tooltips appear when a dashboard user clicks on a mark in the visualization. This is extremely helpful in a crosstab text table with multiple rows of data – no more distracting popups as the mouse scrolls …instead the dashboard user has the control to make the tooltip appear with a simple click action!  Check out my demo dashboard on Tableau Public to take it for a test drive and view how-to-build instructions. Feel free to download & reverse-engineer to make it your own! 

Happy Vizzing!