Customizing Tooltips: Using Visuals as Tooltips in Power BI

Enhance your Power BI visuals with custom tooltips

In this video, you will learn how to add additional data to your dashboards with tooltips in Power BI Desktop. Matt will teach you how to enhance your charts by creating custom visuals in tooltips.

Hi, this is Matt with Playfair+. A great trick to use in Power BI is to put additional data, additional information in a tooltip. However, sometimes the default tooltip setting doesn’t allow exactly what you need. Power BI does let you use a custom tooltip, however, a viz-in-tooltip using a separate report page. we’re going to walk through the steps needed to go and create that and link it back to your viz in this tutorial.

Let’s dive in. The tooltip that automatically pops up for our scatter plot is fine. It shows the relevant information, Subcategory Category, Sum of the Sales Amount, Sum of the Profit column. It’s pretty basic though, so I think we can do better. And I’d really like to do this in a new page.

We’re going to create a specific tooltip to that is pulled when we are looking at this view. So what I want you to do is go in and create a new page, and we’re going to call this Scatter Tooltip. So if you have this already on the foundation, I think it’s… Oh. Yeah. Why is this closing on me? I’m very sorry.

Well, we’re going to do it live anyway. So what we’re going to do here before we even get started right now, you’re looking at a regular visualization page. We need to go into the format of the page itself for this and make some changes before we get done. And we’ll go to, I believe Canvas settings.

And right now it’s set at 16:9. We don’t want the 16:9, we want only the available tooltip size. So that’s maximum 240 high, 320 wide. Um, we can go smaller than this, but we’ll start at the 240 by 320. And so, okay, let’s say we want to put some, some information in the tooltip and we want to make sure it’s formatted the way that we want to see it.

Again, we’re looking at, on the scatter plot, Sales. We’re looking at Profit, we’re looking at Category and Subcategory information. So there’s a couple ways we could go about this. We could bring on a multi-row card, that would be a good piece of information, and what we could do is we could put the Category, we put the Subcategory, we can go ahead and put our Sales Amount and our Profit amount On the page.

It’s pretty straightforward, and then, let’s customize it a little bit. Then we’re going to look at, let’s see, we’ve got our Visual, we’ve got our General. When we’re applying our settings to Category, we can format our text, we can format the background information a little bit. But what we’re going to do for the most part is bring this card back into the scatter plot.

So when we’re looking at the scatter plot, when you scroll down, we want to make sure that we have tooltips available, and then we are going to look at General, Tooltips on, and we’re going to say, hey, what page do you want?

We want it to pull it from a Report page and we want to pull it from Scatter Tooltip. Now, only pages that are at tooltip size or smaller will show up in this page dropdown. So you notice that we have four total pages, they weren’t available. Only the Scatter Tooltip is available because we’ve sized it appropriately.

So we want to take a look there. And now when we hover over a specific view. We get the Components, we get the Category, Subcategory and those labels are so tough. So we want to go in and take a look at this again and say, Sales, let’s change the title to Sales. Change the title to Profit.

And you can see now what would happen as we click over all of these. And let’s see here. I don’t know why it wasn’t showing up before. The version that I have pre-built out is a little different and you can see that here. What we’ve done is we’ve done an actual line chart, and in that line chart we’ve got it split out by Month, because we want to show a trend, and we’re showing Profit.

So let’s say we want to show, month by month. We want to make sure we’re looking at what we’re doing here. And then I’ve also done some custom formatting to it. So let’s go back in to our tooltip and we’ll change this from multi-row card. We’re going to change it to the line chart.

Okay. We don’t have any kind of date field available here. So instead of Category on the x-Axis, we’re going to need to go ahead and bring in Date. Let’s go ahead and bring in Month. You can start seeing how this splits out, and what we’re going to do is let’s change the Title. We’ll go ahead and remove our title because it’s much too long.

And I want to go ahead and show you, we still have Subcategory selected here and that’s fine because when we go back to our tooltip itself, these are going to be filtered down to the individual selections. It’s a really great way of saying like, look, I know it’s very messy here, however it is certainly better to have all of the information at once.

So, we’ve made some changes to the tooltip itself. And I want to say the background is really the big change that we’ve made. We’ll go into ours. Let’s look at General, we’ll look at Effects. Background is on, and currently it’s just set to white.

That’s fine. But what if we did a conditional formatting that would allow us to visually connect the, both the tooltip to the scattered plot? So again, remember we’ve got three categories available and the three separate colors. Let’s use color as our preattentive attribute to make that connection.

So we are going to do a rule and we’re going to base this off of Subcategory, or, sorry. We’re going to base this off of Category. I think to do that actually we’ll need to make sure Category comes into this visual a little bit.

So, let’s see here. Legend, make sure I’m getting the formatting correct on these, Month, Total Profit, Subcategory, Total Sales. Interesting. Again, General, Effects, we’ll take a look at the color changes we’ve done and then we’ve got Rules First Category, and you can see how we’ve built them out to have the multiple selections.

So let’s go back into our example and let’s create that. So Format visual, General tab, Effects, Background, and we’re going to change that. So this is going to be Category, First Category. Now, if the value is, let’s call this Components, then blue. And we’ll add a new rule, add another rule, we’re going to have Components, Accessories, Clothing.

And man, off the top of my head, I should have written these down. I think Clothing was our yellow. Accessories, was that teal? I love that it’s not here anymore on the more colors, always helpful. And then Components was that navy that we were looking at. And you can see the background change.

We don’t have to worry about it here because this is the tooltip specific view. Let’s say Accessories, Clothing, Components. I think I switched them. So when I hover over Accessories, what I want is to get that yellow background, so Accessories yellow. Let’s make sure we make those changes again.

So sorry about that. My color brain was not working this morning. So let’s go ahead and take a look at Effects, Background. Yep. We’ve got to make sure that these are flipped.

Okay, now we’re back. Look at our scatter plot. We hover over something like road frames. Oh my gosh, that’s dark. Yellow. It’s really washing things out. Hmm. What do we need to do? Let’s go back to our tooltip, and this is not trial and error. This is just making sure we’re getting the right viz the way that we want it.

And let’s go to General again. Let’s look at our Effects. Transparency, let’s bump that up. That needs to be at least 75% so now we can really see the information, but the background’s not going to overwhelm, it’s just going to make that subtle connection. We’re looking at something that’s blue, we’re making something, we’re looking at yellow, and you know we’re connecting our information in a way that allows the user to know what they’re looking at.

Hey, I’m looking at a helmet in Accessories, and this is my Sales totals for, you know, the last 12 months. So it’s really nice to be able to see that deeper level of information from that trend, you know, without having to go and create a whole other viz. You’ve done it in the tooltip and now you’re able to showcase it here in a single view. So in a single scatter plot, we’ve got our viz-in-tooltip.

This has been Matt with Playfair+. Thanks for watching.