By Raveesh Kumar

How many times have you thought
– when you view a data visualization you should be able to see and compare
related data points, without actually adding those related data points to the
visualization. You do not want to clutter your already expansive bar graph with
additional bars – right? For example, the below graph shows the revenues for countries
in different regions (AMERICAS, APAC, EMEA). Now, you want to compare the target
revenues for these countries without actually adding additional bars for target
revenues – what do you do?

In an Oracle Analytics data visualization
project,
Tooltip section in grammar panel comes to the rescue! Normally, when you hover
over any bar in a bar graph, you can see a tooltip box listing the values at
that data point. In this case – revenue, region and country name. Now, if you
can also see the value of target revenue to compare in this tooltip box, it
would be great. That is exactly what Tooltip section in grammar panel on the
left of the visualization does. You can drop columns on to this tooltip section and
see that it does not alter the rendering of bar graph. On the other hand, you
will be able to see the value of target revenue when you hover over any bar as
shown below.

You can also customize the
tooltip shown. Suppose you want too see only the data values for the columns present
in tooltip section, then you can go to the General tab in Properties pane and select
Tooltip Grammar only. Now only target revenue values are shown in the tooltip box. Meanwhile, for revenue values, you
can set the Data Labels to ‘Auto’ in Values tab in Properties pane, so that you
can see both revenue and target revenue values together as below – revenue value on top of the bar and target revenue in tooltip box.

The tooltip section in Grammar
panel is available to most of the data visualizations/charts in

Oracle Analytics

such
as Bar, Scatter, Line, Area, Pie, Grid Heat map, Treemap, Sunburst, Boxplot,
Waterfall, Map, Radar, Tag cloud, Tile and Picto. Sometimes, it can be visually
overwhelming to comprehend the information contained in charts. Tooltip section
in grammar panel is one way to minimize this complexity and keep things simple,
an eternal goal of any data visualization tool!