Customising Tooltips in Microsoft Power BI

Hi folks, let’s talk about tooltips. If you’re not sure what they are, try hovering your mouse over any button in an application, for example, Excel. You’ll see a little box pop up with some information about the button. That’s a tooltip.

In Power BI, the standard tooltips provide some basic info about the data point you hover over, but it’s limited. Now you can create custom tooltips to give more detailed information. In this short article, I’ll show you how to easily customise tooltips in Microsoft Power BI to add more information to a standard tooltip.

In my example, I have a column chart that displays Revenue by Country. When I hover the mouse over a data point, the tooltip pops up and shows me the Country and Revenue for that country. That’s ok, but I can already see that in the visual, so it doesn’t really help me. That’s where customisation comes in handy. There’s a lot more you can do with this, like building Tooltip pages, but today is just a quick tip to get you started.

Ok, in my example, I want to see the Units that were sold to make up the Revenue I see in the tooltip.

Adding a Custom Tooltip in Microsoft Power BI

1. Open Power BI and ensure that a visual is selected.
2. Ensure the Visualisations Pane is expanded.
3. Expand the Data Pane to view the tables and fields.
4. Click and drag the table field you want to see into the Tooltips field at the bottom of the Visualisations pane.
5. Add more fields if required by repeating the step above.

Now let’s go and see what happens when I hover over the same data point.

Excellent! I can now see the units that make up the details of the data point. Keep in mind that this tooltip only applies to the visual you customised, but you can repeat the process for other visuals.

As I mentioned, this is just a quick tip, but you can do quite a bit more with custom tooltips and pages if you want more functionality. I hope you found this helpful.