Tooltips

How to add context, clarity, and creativity to your visuals

Why Use Tooltips?

Sometimes your chart needs help telling its full story.

• If you want to explain the chart itself, you can use a small “i” button tied to a bookmark or a text box.

• But if you want to explain the data point being hovered over — that’s where Tooltips come in.

Tooltips can help users explore the “why” behind the numbers, without cluttering the report.

Type 1: Implicit Tooltips (Default)

These come automatically with visuals.

• When you hover over a bar, point, or line, Power BI shows the value behind it

• You can add more fields into the Tooltip section of the visual to enrich this

It’s simple, clean, and works well for most use cases.

1. Default Tooltip

This is Power BI’s built-in tooltip behavior.

Just hover over any chart — and you’ll see the exact values reflected in a text format for clarity.

In our example, we’ve also added an “i” icon on the chart to show how you can improve user education and help users confirm what they’re looking at.

Just hovering it shows us infortmation about the chart.

Notice this Tooltip(above) is blank yet Default Values show (below)

2. Default Tooltip with More Information

This is when you enhance the default tooltip.

The chart may only show Sales, but the tooltip can show Quantity, Number of Invoices, or other helpful metrics.

How to do this?

Just drag these measures into the "Tooltips" section under Visualizations > Build visual > Tooltips.

That’s it — you’ve now extended the story without changing the chart.

Notice below - Deafult shows and then the added 3 (qty, ivoices...) shows too.

Type 2: Report Page Tooltips (Modern Tooltips)

This is where things get fun.

This is when you want to go beyond plain numbers and create a dynamic mini-dashboard inside a hover.

To enable this:

• Create a separate page in your report

• Set its size to something like 300px by 400px. Or a a normal dashboard page. Power Bi will auto-resize it when size gets big.

• In the page format settings, turn "Tooltip" on

• Then, on any visual, go to its Tooltip properties, choose "Report Page", and select your tooltip page

• You create a dedicated tooltip page (300x400 px or so)

• This page becomes a mini dashboard or a dynamic visual explanation panel

When a user hovers over a chart, Power BI pulls in this page and shows it in the corner.

If your relationships are set up correctly, the tooltip becomes context-aware.

Example

You have a sales chart by Product Category.

• Hovering over “Furniture” shows a tooltip with:

  • Total sales

  • Monthly sales trend

  • Top 3 products in that category

All this without clicking anything.

Why It Works

Modern Tooltips act like on-demand insights, giving the user more clarity without interrupting the flow of their analysis.

And best of all, you control everything — layout, logic, visual type, and context.

3. Report Page Tooltip – Mini Dashboard

This is a powerful use case — a full interactive tooltip dashboard that responds to the chart.

For example: Hovering over any product  shows:

• Trend of its monthly sales

• Total revenue

• Top regions that bought it

All filtered to just that particular product.

Important:
Make sure your model relationships are strong — this is what enables the filtering to flow correctly.

Notice 1 - The Tooltip image itself(above) is so big, still, Power Bi was able to make it compressed and fit in the visual area below.

Normally you can keep the page size as 300px*400px of the Tooltip Page or as you see best fit.

Notice 2 - The dashboard values, all the charts change inside the Tootlip when we hover over Different Values. That level of dynamic and speed and the uncompromised beauty is what makes Power Bi SO POWERFUL

4. Report Page Tooltip – Creative

This is where design meets insight.

Imagine hovering over Sales for a product, and seeing:

• The product image

• Basic specs or description

• Pricing tiers - It's like combining financial reporting with an Amazon product experience.

This makes dashboards more human and relatable, especially in business user presentations.

5. Report Page Tooltip – Static

There are cases where you don’t need dynamic content — just useful context.

For example - When your Chart has Levels or Grades and hovering on any bar will show the Definition of Every Level.

In our case study:

• The report shows multiple Product IDs

• The tooltip includes an image that explains which product IDs belong to which product categories

It doesn’t change per value, but it adds background. A static image tooltip is a great way to do this.

Bonus: Hidden Chart on Click – Not a Tooltip, but Still Cool

Try clicking “View Leaderboard” — suddenly a hidden chart appears.

This isn’t a tooltip — it’s done using Bookmarks.

You can use bookmarks to add interactivity beyond hovers — like switching tabs, revealing sections, or building storytelling layers into dashboards.But that’s a topic for a different blog.

Creative Ways to Use Tooltips

• Mini line charts for trends

• KPI panels showing growth or targets

• Conditional logic to highlight risks or flags

• Micro-maps or heat zones

• Comparison of actual vs forecast

You can keep it minimal or make it interactive and rich — depending on your design philosophy.

Final Thoughts

Tooltips are often ignored, but they offer some of the best ROI in terms of user experience:

• You reduce dashboard clutter

• You guide users without teaching them actively

• You make charts more human, more dynamic, and more informative

Use them smartly — and your users will thank you without saying a word.