How to Add Custom Tooltips Mouseover in Power BI

Standard Power BI tooltips can feel a bit underwhelming, often just showing the same numbers you already see on the chart axis. But there’s a powerful, underused feature that lets you transform that simple hover box into a dynamic mini-report with detailed charts and KPIs. This article will show you exactly how to create and apply a custom report page tooltip, giving your users rich, contextual insights on mouseover.

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Why Use Custom Tooltips in Power BI?

Default tooltips are functional but basic. Custom tooltips, on the other hand, unlock a new layer of interactivity and information density in your reports without cluttering your main dashboard. They allow you to tell a much richer data story.

Here’s why they are so valuable:

• Provide Deeper Context: Imagine hovering over a single country on a map and instantly seeing a pie chart of its top-selling product categories, a line chart of its sales trend over the last year, and a card showing the total number of customers. This is impossible with default tooltips.
• Keep Your Dashboard Clean: You can present supplementary information without adding more visuals to your primary report page. The main dashboard stays focused on high-level KPIs, while the details are available just a hover away.
• Drill Down Interactively: The custom tooltip automatically filters its data based on the data point you're hovering over. Hover over "California" on a US map, and the tooltip shows data only for California. Hover over "New York," and it instantly updates to show New York's data.
• Enhance User Experience: Instead of making users navigate to a separate drill-down page, you bring the critical follow-up information directly to them. This creates a more intuitive and fluid analytics experience.

Getting Started: Default Tooltips vs. Report Page Tooltips

Power BI offers two types of tooltips. It's helpful to understand the difference before we build our custom version.

• Default Tooltips: This is the out-of-the-box experience. When you build a visual, you can drag extra data fields into the "Tooltips" bucket in the Visualizations pane. When a user hovers over a data point, those values will appear in a simple black box. It's quick, but limited to just text and numbers.
• Report Page Tooltips: This is the advanced method we're focusing on. You design an entirely separate, small report page and then link it to a visual on your main page. This tooltip page can contain any combination of visuals, cards, and images, creating a fully customized pop-up dashboard.

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Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your First Custom Report Page Tooltip

Let's walk through building a custom tooltip from scratch. For this example, imagine we have a main report page showing total sales by country in a bar chart. Our goal is to create a tooltip that, when hovering over a specific country, shows a breakdown of sales by product category for that country and the total profit generated.

Step 1: Create a New Report Page

First, we need a dedicated page for our tooltip canvas.

1. At the bottom of the Power BI Desktop window, click the plus icon (+) to add a new page.
2. It's good practice to rename this page for clarity. Right-click the new page tab and select "Rename Page." Let's call it "Tooltip - Category Breakdown." This helps you easily find it later.

Step 2: Configure the Page for Tooltip Use

This is the most important step. We need to tell Power BI that this isn't a standard report page, it's a special tooltip page.

1. With your new "Tooltip - Category Breakdown" page selected (and no visuals on it yet), go to the Visualizations pane on the right.
2. Click the "Format your report page" icon (it looks like a paint roller on a page).
3. Expand the Page information section.
4. You'll see a toggle switch for Allow use as tooltip. Turn this switch On.

Once you enable this, you’ll notice the page canvas shrinks. We need to adjust its size.

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Step 3: Set an Appropriate Page Size

A full-size page is obviously too big for a tooltip. Power BI has a preset size that works perfectly.

1. While still in the "Format your report page" section, expand the Canvas settings section.
2. Click the Type dropdown. By default, it’s set to 16:9. Change it to Tooltip.

The canvas will now resize to a small, tooltip-friendly rectangle. You can also create a custom size here if needed, but the default "Tooltip" size is a great starting point.

Step 4: Design Your Tooltip with Visuals

Now for the fun part! You can add any visuals to this canvas just like you would on a regular report page. The data shown in these visuals will be automatically filtered by the data point you hover over on the main chart.

Continuing our example, let's add a donut chart and a card:

1. Add a Donut Chart: From the Visualizations pane, select the Donut chart icon. Drag your Product Category field to the "Legend" well and your Sales field to the "Values" well. Resize it to fit nicely on the small canvas.
2. Add a Card Visual: Select the Card visual from the Visualizations pane. Drag your Profit field into the "Fields" well. This card will display the total profit for the selected country.
3. Formatting: Tweak the colors, font sizes, and labels to make your tooltip clear and easy to read. Since space is limited, turn off unnecessary titles or legends to keep it clean.

Your tooltip page is now designed and ready to be connected.

Step 5: Connect the Tooltip to Your Main Visual

Finally, we need to go back to our main report page and tell our original bar chart to use our new custom tooltip.

1. Navigate back to your main report page containing the "Sales by Country" bar chart.
2. Click on the bar chart visual to select it.
3. In the Visualizations pane, click the "Format your visual" icon (the paintbrush).
4. Expand the General tab, and then find and expand the Tooltips section. You’ll see it's currently set to the "Default" type.
5. Click the Type dropdown and change it from "Default" to Report page.
6. A new dropdown menu called Page will appear below. Click this dropdown and select the tooltip page we created: Tooltip - Category Breakdown.

And that’s it! Now, when you hover your mouse over any bar (country) in your main chart, your beautifully designed custom tooltip will appear, showing you the dynamically filtered donut chart and profit card for that specific country.

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Pro Tips for Highly Effective Tooltips

Building a great custom tooltip is part art and part science. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Keep It Concise: A tooltip is meant for a quick glance, not a deep-dive analysis. Don't overload it with too many visuals or complex charts. Aim for two or three key pieces of contextual information.
• Focus on Meta-Context: The best tooltips provide meta-context - information on what comprises the data point you're seeing. Your main chart shows the "what" (e.g., total sales), the tooltip should show the "who," "why," or "how" (e.g., breakdown by segment, profit margin, top products).
• Watch Your Performance: An overly complicated tooltip with too many calculations can be slow to load when you hover. If you notice a lag, try to simplify the visuals or the DAX measures used within your tooltip page.
• Use Consistent Styling: Ensure the colors, fonts, and general theme of your tooltip match the rest of your report for a cohesive and professional look.

Final Thoughts

You’ve now seen how to replace Power BI’s generic tooltips with custom, dynamic report pages. This technique elevates your dashboards from simple charts into interactive analytical tools, providing deeper layers of context that empower your users to find insights more intuitively.

While mastering features like this in Power BI is rewarding, we know that the learning curve for traditional BI tools can be steep and time-consuming. At Graphed, we’ve taken a different approach by using AI to handle the heavy lifting. Instead of building visuals step-by-step, you can simply describe what you want - like "Create a live dashboard showing sales by country, and when I hover over a country, show me a breakdown by product category” - and our platform builds it for you in seconds, automatically connecting to your live data sources.