Custom Tooltips in Power BI | FULL GUIDE

Key Takeaways

Your Power BI report does not [music] need more visuals. It needs better context. In this video, I'm going to show you how to take a basic Power BI tooltip and turn it into a mini report that actually [music] explains your data when someone hovers over it. We're going to start with the default tooltip, see why it falls short, and then build two custom tooltips that add real value to the report. Let me show you with what we are starting with. Right now, if I hover over this visual, you're seeing I'm just getting a basic tooltip. It's showing me values, but there's no real context here. I can see numbers, I don't know what's driving it, and I definitely don't know anything about the delays that are happening within these specific distance groups that I have in my visual. We're going to go ahead and create a custom tooltip to further enhance this so that our data is being explained and not just adding a hover over that's going to give us some values that don't show us a whole lot of context. So, let's create a new report page. Let's go ahead and click on this format your report page and do the first step in tooltip creation. We're going to change our page to be allowed as a tooltip. Now, as you can see here, my canvas size shrunk down quite a bit. That way, the rest of my report is going to remain visible while this window pops up with that added information. I do want to make this canvas a little bit bigger because I'm thinking when I hover over those different category groups or distance groups, I'd like to know what states have more delays from that particular distance group, and also add a card in that gives me an actual value that shows me how many delays there were based off of that group that I am hovering over. So, I want to have my map up on top and my card down below. So, I'm going to need this to be a little bit taller. So, I'm going to change the height of my tool tip page. Click back on the adding data to our visuals button and I'm going to start by bringing a card on in and bringing our total delays value to that card. I'm going to shrink my card down to the bottom section of my screen and do some simple formatting where I'm going to change my callout values to be in the center of my page. I also am going to make sure it's actually displaying every single place value so that I can see the real nitty-gritty of this data. If I wanted to, I could add in different measures to this card, but we don't want to overwhelm our tool tip. So, I think just this value is good enough. I'm going to click into the background of my canvas, add my shape map visual. I'm going to stretch this guy out nice and big to cover up the rest of the space in my tool tip, and I'd like to know our delays by state. So, I'm going to pop my state name in there. I'm going to put my total delays as my color saturation, and as of right now, we are seeing all of the delays across all of the states for every single state in my data set. The key trick here to making this tool tip turn into a value that's going to show up in my other report page lies in this box right here, drag tool tip field here. I'm going to click into the background of my canvas, and the last and final piece to making this tool tip become alive is to tell Power BI I want to see this tool tip whenever I am looking at my distance group names because that's the data right here inside of my first page. So, I'm going to grab my distance group name, put it into my drag tool tip field here, hover back on my delays overview on that original grouping. And as you can see here, it is compartmentalizing the data. It is filtering down to show me the delays by state and also what that total delays amount is. I can go through each one of these and my map is adjusting as well as my card value is adjusting based off of the total delays, the amount of delays by each distance group. Now, this isn't it. You're not stuck with just one tool tip per report. If you want, you can add multiple tool tips. Now, one good rule of thumb is making sure you're not cluttering it with a whole bunch of extra stuff that makes it hard to look at. So, let's go ahead and double-click on page not one, rename it as tool tip for distance groups, add a new page right here, and we're going to call this next page tool tip for years. On my delays overview, I am thinking when I hover over my delays by year, it'd be nice to have a little bit more information such as what are the top five airports that had a delay in the year 2011. So, we're going to go ahead and head over to that tool tip page, perform the first step to commit it into a tool tip is changing the format of the page information to allow use as tool tip. The next thing that we're going to do is use a visual that sometimes is controversial on adding to a main report page, but one I really like to use in tool tips specifically. And that's going to be either my pie chart or my donut chart. They do the same, the donut just has a hole in the middle. I'm going to go with a pie chart. And in my legend information, I'm going to go ahead and say, let's look at our total delays by airport name. So, I'm going to put airport name in the legend. As you can imagine, we're looking at a ridiculous amount of airports that have had delays because every single airport has ran into a mishap, obviously. The next piece that we're going to put in for our values is going to be that total delays value. Still super ugly and not what I am looking for. I need to adjust my filter context. Let's go ahead and adjust my airport name to show me I'm going to go to this filter type and I'm going to change it to top in filtering. I want to only see the top five airports based off of delays. So, we're going to say top five airports. Just see what that looks like. If it looks like too much, we can always back it down to top three or top four. I never suggest taking a number higher than five, especially if you are using a donut. And we are going to say we're looking at top five airports by performance. We're looking for our total delays measure. Here we go. Let's apply that filter. And now it's broken down to our top five airports. Now, we still need to adjust this visual because our legend right over here is a little bit hard to read and I'm thinking of a better way to display this would actually be opening up our details label, also turning off our legend, and opening up our details label to make sure our label contents include all of those labels so that we have the name of our airport that we are seeing here, the total amount of delays and then what percentage within that top five it makes up. Now, I am going to go to my values and I'm going to change my display units to be none. That way I can have my actual full value. If I'm a little concerned about these airport names not being wide enough, we could come in go back to the the background of our canvas and adjust our canvas setting to make our our canvas size just a little bit bigger. Now, the final piece to making this whole thing happen is actually deciding what tool tip field we need. So, we're going to go in and grab our year from our date table because I believe that's the value that is all right here. Yep, calendar year. We're going to go to tool tip field. We're going to go to date, grab our calendar year, put it in our tool tip field, go back to our delay overview, and now when I hover over my bar, I can see in 2010 what were my five airports that had the most amount of delays. And you should see variation when you move into the next year because this pie chart is being filtered by the data within that visual. Super cool, super easy to understand because we aren't overwhelming our actual report page, we're just adding a good tool tip to allow a little bit more information for you to drill into. And then the final piece to making sure that these tool tips are reserved for pop-up features only would be to come down to the bottom section and go ahead and hide these pages so that they do not pop up whenever you actually publish this report to the Power BI service. Now, this is your secret little sauce hanging out in the background and it's not going to show up when someone's trying to scroll through your report pages. So, if your report feels like it needs more visuals so that you can display the data, it might not. It just might need better context. If you want to build a full Power BI report where features like custom tooltips actually make sense, check out our on-demand learning and our learn with the Nerds series. >> [music] >> And if you want a full roadmap, you can go annual and use my code Emily 40 for 40% off an annual [music] on-demand learning subscription. And let me know in the comments, do you prefer tooltips [music] that show KPIs, trends, or top contributors? I look forward to seeing you next time.