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Tableau Tooltips: The Second Layer of a Dashboard Nobody Designs

Michael Nocito · Updated August 2026 · Every number on this page was worked before it was published

A dashboard has a fixed amount of room and a stakeholder who wants more detail in it. The tooltip is the answer to that conflict, and it is the part of the build that most often ships as whatever Tableau generated.

What you do: write the tooltip as a sentence, add the fields the reader will ask about next, and use viz in tooltip where the follow-up question is really another chart.

The short version. The chart carries the finding. The tooltip carries the follow-up question.

Write it as a sentence

The default tooltip is a field list with the internal names on it. Compare:

Default:
Region: North
SUM(Sales): 131,400
AGG(Margin): 0.184

Written:
North delivered 131,400 in FY26, 9.5% ahead of plan.
Margin was 18.4%, the second highest of the four regions.

Both carry the same numbers. Only one of them can be read while the mouse is moving. Type the words in the tooltip editor and insert the fields with the Insert menu, exactly as you would write a chart title, following the same logic as chart titles that say the finding.

Adding fields without changing the view

Drag any field onto the Tooltip shelf on the Marks card. It becomes available to the text without appearing on the chart and without splitting the marks, provided it is aggregated. A dimension dropped there arrives as ATTR(), which shows the value when every underlying row agrees and an asterisk when they do not. The asterisk is useful information: it says the mark covers more than one value of that field.

Viz in tooltip

A whole worksheet inside the tooltip, filtered to the mark under the cursor. It is the single most impressive thing you can add to a dashboard in five minutes.

1. Build the detail sheet as its own worksheet, for example monthly sales as a line.
2. Keep it minimal: no legend, no axis titles, a short title. It will be displayed small.
3. On the main sheet, open the Tooltip editor and use Insert, Sheets, then choose it.
4. Edit the inserted tag and set maxwidth and maxheight, around 300 by 300 to start.

<Sheet name="Monthly detail" maxwidth="300" maxheight="300" filter="<All Fields>">

The filter attribute decides what is passed to the inner sheet. All Fields filters by everything defining the mark, which is usually right. Naming specific fields gives you the case where the tooltip should show a wider comparison than the mark itself.

Two cautions. The inner sheet is queried on hover, so a slow sheet makes the whole dashboard feel slow. And viz in tooltip does not work on touch devices in the same way, so anything essential must not live only there.

Formatting

1. Match the fonts to the dashboard. The default tooltip font is often larger than everything around it.
2. Bold the one number that matters and leave the rest plain.
3. Set number formats on the fields themselves, not in the tooltip, so every appearance agrees.
4. Uncheck Include command buttons for a published view where you do not want the keep-only and exclude icons.
5. Use Responsive for instant display, or On Hover if the tooltip is heavy enough that flicker is a problem.

What does not belong in a tooltip

How to apply this to your own work

1. Hover over every mark on your main dashboard and read what appears. Most will be the default.
2. Rewrite the two most-used ones as sentences.
3. Add the one field people always ask about next, without putting it on the chart.
4. Try viz in tooltip on the chart that gets the most questions.
5. Check on a tablet or phone that nothing essential is hover-only.

The one habit to keep

Read your tooltip aloud. If it does not form a sentence, it is a field list, and a field list is what the default already gave you.

What is the question people ask after they read your busiest chart?