How to Add Tooltip in Power BI

Power BI tooltips can transform your static charts into interactive, insight-rich experiences. Instead of just showing high-level numbers, tooltips let you offer a deeper look at the data right when your audience needs it. This article will show you how to use both simple, default tooltips and how to build completely custom, multi-visual tooltips using report pages.

What Exactly Is a Power BI Tooltip?

A tooltip is the small window of information that appears when you hover your mouse over a data point in a visual. At its most basic, it tells you the exact value of that bar, slice, or point on the map. It provides immediate context without cluttering up your main report dashboard with extra labels or tables.

For example, if you hover over a country on a sales map, a tooltip can instantly show you:

• Total sales for that country
• Total profit
• Number of orders
• Top-selling product

Power BI gives you two ways to create these: default tooltips, which are quick and easy, and custom report page tooltips, which let you design a mini-report that appears on hover, complete with its own charts and images.

How to Use Default Tooltips

The fastest way to add more context to a visual is by using the default tooltip feature. This lets you drag additional data fields into a dedicated “Tooltips” area in the visualization settings. It's perfect for when you just need to display a few extra numbers.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

Let’s say you have a bar chart showing Total Sales by Product Category. The default tooltip will only show the category name and its sales total. What if you also want to see the Profit Amount and Quantity Sold without adding them to the main chart?

1. Select your visual: Click on the bar chart on your report canvas to activate it.
2. Open the Visualizations Pane: This is the pane on the right-hand side where you build and format your visuals. Make sure you're in the "Build a visual" section (the icon with the bars).
3. Locate the Tooltips field well: Under the fields for the Y-axis and X-axis, you will see a section labeled “Tooltips.”
4. Drag and drop your data: From your "Data" pane, find the fields you want to add, like Profit Amount and Quantity Sold. Drag each one into the “Tooltips” well.

That’s it! Now, when you hover over any bar in your chart, the tooltip will automatically pop up showing the Total Sales (from the Y-axis), plus the Profit Amount and Quantity Sold you just added. Power BI handles the filtering and calculations for you.

Creating Custom Report Page Tooltips

Default tooltips are useful, but what if you want to show a small chart, an image, or more richly formatted text? This is where report page tooltips shine. Here, you design an entirely separate report page and configure it to act as a tooltip. It’s like creating a mini-dashboard that appears on hover, providing deep contextual insights.

This method unlocks incredible creative potential and allows you to deliver a truly professional and user-friendly report.

Your Guide to Building a Report Page Tooltip

Following our previous example, let’s build a custom tooltip for our Sales by Product Category chart. When a user hovers over a category like “Clothing,” we want a tooltip that shows not just numbers, but also a breakdown of sales by sub-category in a donut chart.

Step 1: Create a New Report Page

First, create the page that will become your tooltip. Click the ‘+’ icon on the page navigation bar at the bottom of the Power BI window. To stay organized, give it a clear name. Right-click the new page tab, select “Rename,” and call it "Category Tooltip."

Step 2: Turn the Page into a Tooltip

This is the essential step that tells Power BI this page isn't a standard dashboard.

1. Make sure you have the new "Category Tooltip" page selected, but do not select any visuals on the canvas.
2. Go to the Visualizations pane and click the "Format your report page" icon (the paint roller).
3. Expand the Page information card.
4. Toggle the switch for Allow use as tooltip to "On."

Step 3: Adjust the Canvas Size

Standard report pages are big. We need to shrink ours down to a tooltip size.

1. While still in the "Format your report page" section, expand the Canvas settings card.
2. Click the Type dropdown menu and change it from the default "16:9" to "Tooltip."

The canvas on your screen will immediately shrink to a small rectangle, giving you a preview of how your tooltip will look.

Step 4: Design Your Tooltip Visuals

Now for the fun part. You are simply adding visuals to this small canvas just like you would on a normal report page. Power BI will automatically filter them based on the data point the user is hovering over on the main chart. On your small tooltip canvas, let’s add a few things:

• A Card visual: Drag a Card visual onto the canvas. From the Data pane, drag "Total Sales" into its "Fields" well. This will show the precise sales number.
• A second Card visual: Add another card and drag "Profit Margin" into its field.
• A Donut Chart: Add a Donut chart visual. Drag "Product Sub-Category" into the "Legend" field and "Total Sales" into the "Values" field.

Feel free to format these visuals to make them look clean and professional. Your "Category Tooltip" page is now a fully designed, data-driven pop-up waiting to be used.

Step 5: Apply the Custom Tooltip to a Visual

Finally, we need to tell our original bar chart to use this new creation.

1. Navigate back to your main report page containing the Sales by Product Category bar chart.
2. Click on the bar chart to select it.
3. Go to the Visualizations pane and select "Format your visual" (the paint roller icon).
4. Expand the "General" tab at the top.
5. Find and expand the Tooltips card. The options here will have changed because Power BI knows you have a tooltip-enabled page in your report.
6. Change the Type dropdown from "Default" to "Report page."
7. In the new Page dropdown that appears, select your "Category Tooltip" page.

Step 6: See It in Action!

The setup is complete. Go back to your bar chart and hover over any one of the categories. Your custom tooltip page should immediately appear, displaying the visuals you created. Notice that as you move your mouse from one category to another (e.g., from “Clothing” to “Accessories”), the data in the tooltip - including the numbers on the cards and the entire donut chart - updates instantly to reflect the right context.

Best Practices for Great Tooltips

Custom tooltips are powerful, but good design makes them great. Here are a few tips:

• Don't Overcrowd It: The tooltip canvas is small for a reason. Keep it simple and focused. Show only the most critical supplemental information.
• Prioritize Readability: Use clear fonts and sufficient color contrast. Your goal is to provide glanceable insights, not a wall of text.
• Stay Relevant: The information in the tooltip should be directly related to the item you're hovering over. If the main chart is about sales, the tooltip should show details related to sales, like profit, units sold, or customer counts.
• Monitor Report Performance: Extremely complex tooltips applied to visuals with thousands of data points can sometimes slow down report interaction. Use them judiciously for the biggest impact.

Final Thoughts

Whether you're adding a few extra numbers with default settings or building dynamic custom visuals on a report page, tooltips are a fantastic way to increase the data density of your Power BI reports without overwhelming your users. They guide your audience to deeper insights and make your dashboards more intuitive and useful.

While mastering tools like Power BI is a valuable skill, it often comes with a steep learning curve and hours of manual report building. We designed Graphed to remove that complexity entirely. Instead of clicking through menus to add tooltips, configure visuals, and set up pages, you can connect your data sources and simply ask for a dashboard in plain English. Graphed automatically generates interactive dashboards and reports in seconds, so you can skip the setup and get straight to the insights you need to grow your business.