Compare Data Without Cluttering Your Data Visualizations
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!
