Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Adding these labels is helpful and allows the audience to pick out a few other stories from
the view. For example, I can recall my father telling me about Maurice “the Rocket” Richard
when I was a boy. He was known as a legendary goal scorer, and now I can see why: he is
one of the few players in the top 100 with more career goals than assists, so he did little else
than put the puck in the back of the net, relatively speaking.
It's possible to force Tableau to show all the labels, but I don't recommend it. Go ahead and
try it out if you feel the need to, by clicking
Label
and checking the box at the bottom where
it says
Allow labels to overlap other marks
. Don't say I didn't warn you, though. Sometimes
more is less.
Tooltips
What about the other points without labels? How can we see who they are? Tableau has a
great feature called Tooltips, which appear when a person interacting with the chart hovers
the mouse cursor over an individual mark (or circle, in this case).
What would be an interesting data point to investigate further? How about the blue point just
below Messier? We know blue means the player played relatively few games. Who is this
player, and how did he rack up so many goals and assists in such a small number of games?
Let's hover the mouse over the point or click on it to discover who it is. The mystery is re-
vealed in
Figure 8-6
.
Hovering over the blue circle in the upper right reveals that the player is none other than
former Pittsburgh center Mario Lemieux, another remarkable player whose career was inter-
rupted by a number of injuries and health problems, including Hodgkin's lymphoma. We can
only imagine how many points he would have tallied had he played as many games as Gret-
zky.
It's possible to modify the tooltip, and we'll cover formatting of tooltips later in
Chapter 13
.
But if you want to play with them yourself now, just click
Worksheet
→
Tooltip
and the dia-
log box shown in
Figure 8-7
appears.
