Power BI Tooltips: Add Insight Without Adding Pages

Tooltips are the small pop-ups you see when you hover a data point in Power BI.  They’re not just labels they add extra context right where you’re looking. Use them to show quick comparisons, trends, or a short breakdown. That keeps the page clean and avoids sending people to other visuals or pages. You can even build mini-report views that appear only on hover. Done well, tooltips make reports faster to read and easier to understand. It’s a simple upgrade that makes a basic report feel polished.

Types of Tooltips:
• Default Tooltip
• Modern Tooltip
• Custom Tooltip
• Report tooltips to enhance your visualization

1. How to apply Default Tooltip:

• Select the visual.
• Open the Visualizations pane, then Format visual.
• Open Tooltips and turn it On.
• Type = Default, Page = Auto (grayed out when Default is selected).

When a user hovers over a bar (month), a small popup will appear showing additional information (like exact sales value). Default tooltip type is selected, so Power BI will show basic info (e.g., Month Name and Sales) automatically.

2. How to apply Modern Tooltip:

Modern Power BI tooltips offer an enhanced way to interact with data by supporting drill-down and drill-through actions directly within the tooltip, and they also update their styling based on your report’s theme. These tooltips can even display an entire report page as a tooltip, allowing for more complex and contextually rich information displays. 

• Go to File >> Options and settings >> Options.
• Under Preview features, check the box for Modern visual tooltips.
• Click OK to apply the changes.

How to Enable Modern Visual Tooltips in Power BI:
• Open Power BI Desktop.
• Go to File >> Options and settings >> Options.
• In the left panel, scroll down and click on Report settings under Current File.
• Find the section labelled Modern visual tooltips.
• Check the box: Use modern visual tooltips with drill actions and updated styling.
• Click the OK button at the bottom-right.
• Restart Power BI Desktop to apply the changes.

When the new on-visual tooltips are enabled, you can drill down/up and drill through straight from the tooltip no right-click or visual header needed.

In the screenshot, hovering the 2013 bar in “Sum of Sales by Year” shows a tooltip with Year: 2013 and Sum of Sales: 26,415,255.51, plus a Drill down action. Selecting Drill down takes the chart to the next level of your Date hierarchy (e.g., Quarter >> Month >> Day) filtered to 2013.

Click on Drill down button. It’s show month view of sum of sales of 2013

Hover any month’s bar to see its tooltip with that month’s Sum of Sales and the actions Drill up and Drill down. Choose Drill up to return to the yearly view, choose Drill down to see day-level sales for the selected month in 2013.

Formatting: In the modern tooltip, you can control text colors
Go to Format visual >> General >> Text, then set Label color, Value color, and Drill text & icon color.

To change the tooltip background: open Format visual, go to General, then Background (or Tooltip > Background), choose a color and adjust Transparency to control opacity.

3. Custom tooltip

To create customize tooltip : In the visualization field pane and drag the field you want to show in tooltip. And then field show on tooltip hover

To change the aggregation, right-click that field under Tooltips and choose Average, Max, etc.

4. Report tooltips to enhance your visualization

Create a new page for the tooltip, rename it (e.g., ‘Tooltip – Sales’), then right-click the page tab and choose Hide so users don’t see the page.

On the tooltip page, open the Format pane >> Canvas settings >> Page size. Set Type = Tooltip for the preset size, or choose Custom and enter your own Width/Height to adjust the tooltip size.

Create a dedicated tooltip page in your report and Add the cards/fields/charts you want users to see when they hover.

Open the Format pane, go to Page information, and turn Tooltip On.

Go to the report page where you want the tooltip and select the visual.
In the Visualizations pane, open Tooltips, turn it On, and set Type to Report page.
Choose your tooltip page by name (e.g., Tooltip

Revert to default tooltip:
To switch back to the default tooltip, select the visual. In the Visualizations pane, open Tooltips and set Type(or Page) to Auto. Power BI will show the built-in default tooltip again.

Limitations :

• No hover in exports: tooltips don’t show in PDF, PPT, image exports, or email subscriptions.
• Mobile and touch: access is via long-press; discoverability is lower test in the Power BI Mobile app.
• Performance: report-page tooltips are visuals; keep them simple to avoid lag.
• Visual support: some custom/older visuals may not support modern tooltips or drill actions.
• Accessibility: hover isn’t ideal for keyboard-only or screen-reader users don’t hide must-see info only in tooltips.
• Security and context: tooltips respect RLS and filter context double-check measures that use ALL/REMOVEFILTERS so numbers don’t confuse readers.