Dynamic Tooltips / Mouseover

Tooltips can be a useful addition to reporting, often used to display additional context or information which you don’t want to have permanently visible in the main body of the report. When the user sees a value of interest they simply hover over the cell and a popup displays the additional detail. The additional information can be anything required, as long as it can be retrieved from an Excel cell (or direct from the cube). Examples could include some textual information or sales for the same period last year.

Implementing this in XLCubed reports is straightforward, albeit not immediately obvious. Tooltips are implemented using the XL3Link() formula, most commonly used for in-context navigation within a report, where the focus is moved from one sheet to another while passing a parameter. A special parameter, introduced in version 8.1, extends XL3Link() for tooltips as explained below.

The syntax for XL3Link is:

XL3Link( [LinkLocation], [FriendlyName], [LinkType], [Range1], [Value1],…, [Range13], [Value13] )

LinkLocation: where the focus would normally jump to on clicking the cell. This can be left blank if you just want a tooltip.

Friendlyname: what is displayed in the cell. This could be static text (“i”) or an Excel formula referencing other cells in the workbook as needed.

LinkType: can be left blank for Tooltips.

To specify a tooltip, set Range1 to the value “XL3Tooltip”, and Value1 to be the content you want displayed in the tooltip. Value1 can be static text or can reference other cells as required, which means you can display other values which are also dynamically retrieved from the cube based on slicer selections etc. If the report is variable in length, the formula can be added into an XLCubed grid calculation and the Value1 parameter could use a vlookup to ensure a match on the appropriate data element.

The simple example below shows the basic approach, and the result also works when published to XLCubed Web.

The extended example below shows combining several additional data fields. The line breaks are achieved using Alt + Enter.

Thanks to our colleague Norbert Engelhardt at pmOne who blogged on this point recently in German and prompted this piece, basically an English version of the original:

XLCubed Insights #4 – Mouseover Funktion in XLCubed Berichten

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