How to add selective labels to your scatter plot

If you have many different points in your scatter plot, displaying all of their labels at once might look a bit messy and confusing. Take this example:

To reduce the clutter, there are several options: You can either opt for a selective label mode, which will only show certain dots that you select when you add your visualization to a story. The other option is to use annotations. This help doc will walk you through both options.

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Selective labels

Selective labels are great when you would like to display more than five labels and don't want to have to add each one manually through annotations. Here's an example:

To enable selective labels, make sure you've selected SVG as a renderer in the Dot styles settings. The reason you have to ensure that SVG and not WebGL is selected for selective labels to work is that WebGL mode is still in beta and doesn't yet support this functionality. 



Next, in the Dot labels settings, select to show labels on points and then select  Selective (story only).



TIP: We recommend disabling your popups in the Popups settings before selecting the labels in your story. This makes adding the selective labels in the next step easier, as the popups won't interfere when you click on them in the story editor. You can enable them again after setting your selective labels in the next step.

Finally, add your visualization to a story by clicking Create a story in the top right corner. Once you're in the story, you can click on the points that you'd like to display a label, and the label will appear. Clicking on the same point a second time will make the label disappear again.



Once you have placed your labels, you might want to enable the popups again. To do this, click through to the underlying visualization via the "Current slide" button. Other things you might want to change include:

• the styling, alignment, and placement of labels – to learn more about this, head over to this help doc
• removing the story navigation – this is useful if you only have one slide. Here's more on that topic.

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Annotations

Another way to add selective labels to your scatter plot is through annotations. With annotations, you have full flexibility over positioning and styling, but you will have to add each label manually. It is therefore only recommended when you would like to add less than five labels. Here's an example of the same scatter plot with annotations: 

You can add annotations by adding your visualization to a story and clicking on the pen icon to add and edit them. Note that this will work best if you don't have labels or selective labels enabled.



To learn more about adding annotations to your scatter plot, head over to this help doc. Other things you might want to change include:


• coloring parts of your annotation text through custom HTML. You can learn more about this here.
• removing the story navigation – this is useful if you only have one slide. Here's more on that topic.