This update may not seem like a groundbreaking one, but as a user who uses Data Explorer 24/7, this one has been on my bucket list for a long time, and I'm unreasonably excited about it.

Read on!

Have you ever selected a large number of dimensions in Data Explorer, and been surprised to see the chart's Hover Tooltip cover the entire chart?

It used to drive me crazy... and while this wasn't mentioned by our users as an annoyance often, I'm pretty sure many people accepted it as an immutable reality that was never gonna change.

The screenshot below used to make me curse 🤬 even more than when I had to read text written with the Comic Sans font - and anyone who knows me enough knows how angry I get at the bare mention of this typeface...
Believe it or not, but there's an actual chart behind this tooltip on the screen grab below!!!

... and the main reason was that our charting library required so many technical contortions to get the tooltip to freely overflow out of the embedded chart that we could never find the necessary amount engineering cycles to fix it.

You will now be glad to hear that we have fixed this, and also provided a first round of layout efforts to make said Tooltip more legible. As you can see, the tooltip can now travel outside of the chart embed and take as much real estate as it needs from both the data table below, and the query panel as well, always leaving the currently-hovered part of the chart visible.

Laugh at me all you want, but every now and then, you get to fix one of your own nightmares and it feels very good - today is one of those days. :)

The story of how this came up is also a glorious one: during our weekly Product Design office hours, one of the designers teamed up live with one of our engineers and decided they were going to fix this LIVE during the meeting. Granted, it eventually took more than this live coding session in front of everyone, but it was a marvel of collaboration and ownership to watch, so tip of the hat to these two employees reading this article who'll know who they are, I'm pretty sure a lot of our users will be delighted!

Hope you enjoy the new tooltip as much as I do.