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Caveat: This has only been tested for Line and Bar charts. Not all chart types allow the vis config customizations that this approach relies on. Additionally, this is not an “official” workflow, it’s more of a hack that could potentially break at any point in the future. That said, I’m documenting it here because I think it’s cool & some folks might find it helpful 🙂
Problem:
You’d like to be able to add notes to a visualization, perhaps to call out a certain row of data, or add short comments to a visualization at specific points.
Solution:
Starting with a table like so:
- Create a table calc that outputs the annotation text at the desired row(s), and null for all other rows
If, for example, we wanted to show an annotation of "Orders at 2019-01: 941" at the first row, and "Orders at 2019-12: 1002" at the last row, we could use this to evaluate true for only those 2 rows:
row()=1 OR row()=max(offset_list(row(),0,count(${sc_orders.output_dim})))
And this to display the desired text:
concat("Orders at ", to_string(${created_date}), ":", to_string(${orders.count}))Put it all together and we have:
if(row()=1 OR row()=max(offset_list(row(),0,count(${sc_orders.output_dim}))),concat("Orders at ", to_string(${sc_orders.output_dim}), ": ", to_string(${sc_orders.output_measure})),null)- Now some Vis hackery. Do the following:
- Select line chart for vis type
- In Plot settings, turn off plot null values
- Select bar chart for vis type
- In Series > Customizations, make the primary measure a line and change the color of the table calc to white
- In Y menu settings, drag the table calc from 1 into the right Y axis, select the second y axis and turn off show axis name and show axis values
- In Values menu, turn on value labels. If Value Labels for other fields are not desired, in value colors input "transparent, red" (can be any color)
- Voila!
A few examples of what this can end up looking like:
