Interact with visualizations

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This article applies to the following Customer Insights roles: Viewer; Developer


Filters arenโ€™t the only way to interact with a Look or a Dashboard. In addition to setting filters, you can also:

  • Hover the mouse over individual data points to see actual totals
  • Show/hide items in a visualization
  • Re-sort the data in the data table
  • Zoom in and out on a map

Hover the mouse over individual data points to see actual totals

Many visualizations are designed to show you trends and relationships; for example, one quick glance at the Events By Top 15 Device Brands visualization tells you that most people are accessing your site by using Apple devices:

Thatโ€™s excellent information. But suppose you wanted to know the actual number of events associated with Apple devices. Thatโ€™s harder to determine, especially since the Apple value extends beyond the tick mark (10,000,000). But thatโ€™s OK; to see the actual value for a data point, just hover the mouse anywhere over that data point:


Show or hide items in a visualization

Some visualizations enable you to modify (within limitations) the fields displayed in that visualization. For example, take a Look at the Events By Day of Week visualization:

If you look very closely (and for Tuesday only), youโ€™ll see a light brown line representing the signin.social_register event. Obviously, this event type doesnโ€™t occur very often; it barely registers at all. Of course, many of the other event types donโ€™t stand out, either; thatโ€™s because the vast majority of events are signin.tradtional events. Taking a few terminology liberties here, we have a poor signal-to-noise ratio: the sheer abundance of signin.traditional events makes it difficult to get a good picture of the other event types.

So what can we do about that? Well, one thing we can do is temporarily hide the signin.traditional events. If we click signin.traditional in the legend, our visualization will redraw itself to look like this (note how signin.traditional is grayed-out):

To restore the visualization to its original format, just click signin.traditional again.


Sort the data in the data table

If you have data presented in a table, you can sort that data by clicking the appropriate column header. For example, by default the Events By Browser (Table) visualization sorts data by Count. Would you rather have the data sorted alphabetically by browser name? Thatโ€™s fine; just click the Browser column heading:

That sorts the data in descending order (Z to A; note the downward-pointing arrow). To sort data in ascending order (A to Z), click the column header a second time:

Once again, note the direction of the arrow.


Zoom in and out on a map

If youโ€™re working with a map visualization, you might have the ability to zoom in and out on the map. (As usual, that depends on whether the Dashboard/Look developer enabled that option.) For example, suppose you have a visualization similar to this:

Letโ€™s further suppose your primary interest is in central Europe. In that case, just click the zoom-in tool (the +) a few times:

And what if you zoom in and now things are a bit off-kilter? Again, no problem: just hold the mouse over the map and see if a little hand icon appears. If it does, that means you can click the mouse, hold down the left mouse button, and drag the map around until you have the view you want.

And if thatโ€™s not enough, clicking a spot at the map will reveal the data for the location: