Clearly and Simply

Tag: summary tooltips

  • Interactive Tooltip Examples

    3 Examples of how to use an ActiveX Spreadsheet Control as a Tooltip on a Microsoft Excel Worksheet

    Prova Riporti - Photographer il Vanzo - tiny little pieces (flickr.com)The recent post described how to use an ActiveX Spreadsheet Control as a tooltip on Excel worksheets. At first sight this seemed to be a nifty little idea to spice up tooltips on Microsoft Excel worksheets. In the meantime, however, I had to learn that there is a major pitfall:

    The heart of the solution, the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control is part of the so called Office Web Components. So far, so good. The problem is that Microsoft does not ship the Office Web Components with Office 2007 and later anymore. In other words, in a clean, new Office 2007/2010 installation, the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control is not available anymore.

    Microsoft still provides the Office Web Components for free download (Office 2003 Add-in: Office Web Components), but there is still a major drawback: if you want to use the described technique, you have to make sure that every user of your workbook either uses Excel 2003 or has the Office Web Components installed.

    At the end of the previous post I announced a follow up article with more practical examples using the technique. Knowing now what I didn’t know before, I pondered if this article would still make sense. To cut a long story short, I finally decided to publish it despite the limitation described above. Maybe some of you will still find it interesting and useful.

    Today’s post provides 3 different use cases of how to take advantage of the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control in a tooltip:

    • a scrollable tooltip
    • side calculations within a tooltip
    • an improved version of the Summary Card tooltip

    As always the articles provides all Excel workbooks for free download.

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  • Interactive Tooltips on Excel Worksheets

    The Next Level of Tooltips on Excel Worksheets: Taking Advantage of the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control

    Marchant mechanical calculating machine - Photographer: Ian's Shutter Habit (flickr.com)Tooltips are one of the most helpful features when prospecting large data sets.

    We already had a couple of articles talking about tooltips, on charts and on worksheets:

    Tooltips on Microsoft Excel Tables

    Charts in Excel Table Tooltips

    Display all Fields of a Row in large Excel Tables

    Better Chart Tooltips with Microsoft Excel 2010

    Today’s post is trying to take this to the next level: an interactive tooltip on a Microsoft Excel worksheet. You may ask:

    “What the heck is an interactive tooltip?”

    What I am thinking of is a tooltip enabling you not only to read additional information but also interact with it. E.g. copy data from the tooltip and paste it somewhere else, do side calculations based on the currently selected data, browse through a longer list of data in the tooltip, etc.

    Impossible? No it isn’t. Microsoft provides a very useful ActiveX control which enables us to do exactly this: the Microsoft Office Spreadsheet Control. Today’s post shows how to take advantage of this ActiveX control in order to provide an interactive tooltip on Excel worksheets – as always including the Excel workbook for free download.

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  • Tooltips on Microsoft Excel Tables

    How to display Tooltips on Microsoft Excel Tables including additional information on the selected cell and aggregation results for the entire column

    Microsoft Excel Table TooltipsTooltips are a very helpful feature when exploring and investigating data. On charts and on plain data tables. When referring to tooltips, I am talking about additional details on the data currently selected or hovered over using the mouse. Tooltips could include other dimensions and measures, calculations or aggregated information like totals or averages.

    Tableau Software provides very powerful and easy to use tooltips. If you are working with Tableau, I once again recommend having a look at Andy Cotgreave’s great Tableau tooltip articles on the Data Studio (Tableau Tooltips: Conditional Formatting or Charts inside a tooltip? Yes, we can.). Thanks again for sharing, Andy.

    Compared to Tableau, Microsoft Excel’s tooltips functionality is next to nothing. We already had a post showing how to improve tooltips on Excel charts: Better Chart Tooltips with Microsoft Excel 2010.

    However, tooltips can be very helpful in plain data tables as well. Sure, Excel automatically displays some calculated aggregations of the selected range in the status bar. Yet, this is not enough. Your eyes always have to jump down to the status bar to see the information, the displayed quick calculations are limited and inflexible and you always have to select the range first. If you are working with larger data tables, you may wish for tooltips providing additional information on the selected value (like the percentage of total, the rank, etc.) and on aggregations across the entire column (like sum, average, etc.).

    Today’s post provides two slightly different approaches how to create better tooltips on Microsoft Excel tables. As usual including the Excel workbooks for free download.

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