How to Create Report Page Tooltips in Power BI

A simple tooltip can be the difference between a static chart and an insightful, interactive reporting experience. While Power BI's default tooltips are helpful for showing basic values, report page tooltips let you display entire visuals, cards, and rich context just by hovering over a data point. This guide walks you through exactly how to build and implement them, step-by-step.

What Are Power BI Report Page Tooltips?

In Power BI, a tooltip is the small pop-up box that appears when you hover your mouse over a specific element of a visual. By default, this box shows you the data values associated with that element. For example, hovering over a bar in a sales chart might show you the exact sales figure and the corresponding month.

A report page tooltip is a custom-designed tooltip that uses a separate report page as its canvas. Instead of just showing simple text and values, you can place fully functional Power BI visuals - like line charts, funnel charts, cards, or text boxes - inside the tooltip. This custom page then appears when a user hovers over a data point on another visual in your report.

Why Go to the Trouble of Making Custom Tooltips?

While default tooltips get the job done for showing raw numbers, report page tooltips solve a few key reporting challenges:

• Provide Deeper Context: You can answer the viewer's "next question" without them needing to drill down or navigate to another page. For example, if your main chart shows total sales by country, your tooltip could show a line chart of sales trends over time for that specific country.
• Keep Your Dashboard Clean: You can add layers of rich, detailed information without cluttering your main report canvas. Your dashboard stays clean and high-level, while the details are just a quick hover away.
• Enhance Visual Storytelling: Report page tooltips let you guide the user through the data more effectively. You can show underlying drivers, compare segments, or highlight key metrics that contribute to the top-level number.

Essentially, they allow you to create a "report within a report" that is dynamically filtered based on what the user is examining in the main visual.

How to Create a Report Page Tooltip: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating a report page tooltip involves two main phases: designing the tooltip page itself, and then applying that page to a visual in your main report. Let's walk through it with a practical example. Imagine we have a bar chart showing Total Profit by Sales Region and want to see a breakdown of Profit by Product Category when we hover over a specific region.

Step 1: Create a New Report Page for Your Tooltip

Every report page tooltip lives on its own dedicated report page. The first step is to create it.

1. At the bottom of the Power BI Desktop window, click the '+' icon to add a new page.
2. It's a good practice to name this page something descriptive. Double-click the page tab (e.g., "Page 1") and rename it to something like "Region Tooltip" or "Tooltip - Category Detail". This will make it easier to find later.

For now, this new page is just a standard, blank report canvas. Our next step is to tell Power BI that this page is a special type of page intended for tooltips.

Step 2: Configure the Page Settings

With your new tooltip page selected, you need to change a couple of settings in the Format pane to enable it as a tooltip.

1. Make sure no visuals are selected on your new page canvas. You should be formatting the page itself.
2. In the Visualizations pane on the right, select the Format page icon (it looks like a paint roller on a canvas).
3. Expand the Page information section.
4. Toggle the switch for Allow use as a tooltip to On. This is the most crucial step! Once you do this, you'll notice the page layout on your canvas immediately shrinks.
5. Next, expand the Canvas settings section. Under Type, the default after turning on the tooltip feature is often "Tooltip." This resizes the canvas to a predefined tooltip size (320px wide by 240px tall). You can leave it as is or choose "Custom" to define your own size if you need more or less space for your visuals.

Power BI now recognizes this page not as a standard report page, but as a small canvas that can be called upon by other visuals as a tooltip.

Step 3: Design and Build Your Tooltip Visual

Now for the creative part! You can add any visuals you wish to this small tooltip canvas. The data shown in these visuals will be automatically filtered by the data point you're hovering over on the main report.

Continuing our example, we want to show a breakdown of profit by product category:

1. From the Visualizations pane, select the visual you want to use. A clustered column chart works well for showing category breakdowns.
2. Drag the chart onto your small tooltip canvas and resize it to fit.
3. Drag your data fields into the visual's configuration wells. For our example:

You can add more than just one visual. You could add a Card visual to show the total number of orders for that region, or even a pie chart if that fits your needs. Just remember that space is limited, so keep the design clean and focused.

At this stage, the chart on your tooltip page will show aggregated, unfiltered data. Don't worry about this, the magic happens when we connect it to our main visual.

Step 4: Hide the Tooltip Page

Your tooltip page is not meant to be a standalone page for end-users to navigate to. It should only appear on hover. Hiding the page removes it from the standard page navigation in the published report.

Simply right-click on the tooltip page's tab and select Hide page. You'll see a small hide icon (an eye with a slash through it) appear next to the page name. You can still access and edit it in Power BI Desktop, but viewers of the published report will not see it as a navigable page.

Step 5: Apply the Tooltip to Your Primary Visual

With your tooltip designed and hidden, it's time to connect it to the main chart in your report.

1. Navigate back to your main report page (the one with the Total Profit by Sales Region bar chart).
2. Select the bar chart visual. This is key, you must have the specific visual selected that you want to apply the tooltip to.
3. Go to the Format visual section in the Visualizations pane.
4. Expand the General tab.
5. Find the Tooltips card and expand it. It might already be on, showing the default settings.
6. Change the Type from "Default" to "Report page".
7. A new dropdown menu called Page will appear. Click it and select the tooltip page you created and named earlier (e.g., "Region Tooltip").

Step 6: Test Your New Tooltip!

That's it! Your report page tooltip is now active. Hover your mouse over any of the bars in your Total Profit by Sales Region chart. Instead of the standard black box with text, you should now see your custom-designed chart appear, filtered specifically for the region you are hovering over. For instance, hovering over the "West" region bar will show a column chart breaking down the profit by product category just for the West region.

Tips for Effective Report Page Tooltips

Building them is one thing, building them well is another. Here are a few tips to make your tooltips useful and user-friendly:

• Keep It Focused: The tooltip should supplement, not replace, the main visual. It should provide relevant, contextual information that answers a follow-up question. Don't try to cram an entire dashboard into a tiny pop-up.
• Mind the Size: Be careful not to make your tooltip so large that it covers other important visuals on your main report page. The default "Tooltip" size is a good starting point, but feel free to customize it if needed.
• Optimize for Performance: A tooltip with five complex DAX measures and three high-cardinality charts might slow down your report's hover experience. Keep the visuals in your tooltip relatively simple to ensure they load instantly.
• Explicitly Disable Tooltips Where Needed: On your tooltip page itself, you may want to disable tooltips for the visuals you added there. Select a visual on your tooltip canvas, go to Format -> General -> Tooltips, and turn the switch off. This prevents a weird "tooltip-within-a-tooltip" effect.

Final Thoughts

Report page tooltips are a fantastic way to add analytical depth to your Power BI reports without overwhelming your users or cluttering the interface. By designing a separate page for contextual visuals and linking it to your main charts, you transform a basic report into a rich, exploratory experience that encourages user engagement.

Of course, building these advanced interactions is much easier when your data is already connected and ready to go. Before we can even think about cool customizations like tooltips, we often spend hours getting marketing, sales, and web data into one place. This is where we built Graphed to simplify our own workflow. We sync your sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce for you, which lets you build live dashboards instantly with simple, plain-English questions. It lets us jump straight to designing insightful reports instead of getting stuck on manual data prep.