Power BI continues to evolve as enterprises demand richer interactivity, deeper insights, and cleaner reporting experiences. One of the most powerful yet underutilized features for enhancing user experience is the custom tooltip. Instead of overwhelming users with too many visuals on a single dashboard, custom tooltips allow you to show supporting insights only when needed, creating intuitive, intelligent, and highly efficient analytic experiences.
In this blog, we’ll be creating a custom tooltip and also see how we can configure it in Power BI.
Here, along with the sales amount on the clustered column chart, we want to see the total quantity and quantity by product category.
We’ll be able to see that by creating the custom tooltip.
Below are the steps to create the custom tooltip –
Step 01
For creating a custom tooltip, we have to add a new tab in the report and change the size of that tab to Tooltip in the Visualization pane.
After this, go to Visualization pane > Page Information and enable the option ‘Allow use as tooltip’.
Step 02
We can customize the page by changing the background and adding all the visuals which you need to see on your tooltip. I have added a card visual containing Quantity and a clustered bar chart which is showing Quantity by Product Category.
Below is the Tooltip tab which I have created.
Step 03
Select the visual in which you need to add the custom tooltip. Go to the Visualization pane > Format visuals > General and enable the tooltips option. In that select Report Page in Type and then select the tooltip which you have created for your visual in Page i.e., Custome Tooltip in my case.
After all the above configurations the Custom Tooltip tab which we created should pop up whenever we’ll hover over the bar of our clustered column chart. Also, you can hide the tooltip tab so that it doesn’t appear to the end user.
Why Custom Tooltips Matter More Than Ever
As BI teams scale dashboards across departments, a common challenge emerges:
How do you keep reports clean and intuitive without removing important context?
Custom tooltips solve this by enabling:
✔ Cleaner dashboards
Users get detailed insights only when they hover, reducing clutter and enhancing visual hierarchy.
✔ Faster insight discovery
Instead of navigating multiple pages, users access key metrics instantly.
✔ Better data storytelling
Tooltips deliver micro-narratives—supporting KPIs, category breakdowns, or contextual benchmarks—directly on demand.
✔ Enhanced performance
Instead of loading multiple visuals on a single page, offloading them to tooltip pages keeps the main report lightweight.
As organizations shift toward self-service BI, features like custom tooltips elevate user experience while enabling enterprise-grade clarity and transparency.
Expert Design Tips for High-Impact Tooltips
To maximize the value of your tooltip pages:
1. Keep visuals minimal and purposeful.
One KPI + one visual is usually enough.
2. Use consistent formatting.
Matching fonts, background colors, and styles reinforces a unified design.
3. Avoid complex DAX calculations inside tooltip visuals.
Heavy measures can slow tooltip loading.
4. Align tooltip content with the main visual.
If the main chart shows Sales Amount, the tooltip should support that narrative—not introduce unrelated metrics.
5. Use Microsoft Fabric + semantic models for scalability.
By centralizing business logic in the semantic layer, tooltips remain accurate across teams and reports.
Advanced Possibilities: AI-Enhanced Tooltips
With Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI, and Copilot for Power BI, custom tooltips can now include:
- AI-generated insights
- Forecast values
- Anomaly detection indicators
- Automated commentary summarizing performance trends
This transforms Power BI from a reporting tool into a context-aware decision engine.
Imagine a tooltip that not only shows Quantity by Category, but also:
AI prediction: Electronics category expected to grow 18% next quarter.
This is the future of BI, and Addend Analytics helps organizations implement it today.
Governance & Performance Considerations
Enterprise BI teams should ensure:
- Tooltip visuals use certified datasets
- Row-level security applies consistently
- Page size and visuals remain lightweight
- Tooltips are hidden from navigation to maintain UX clarity
Following these guidelines ensures tooltips don’t just look good – they perform at scale.
Why Addend Analytics Is the Partner of Choice for Power BI & Microsoft Fabric
Addend Analytics delivers:
- AI-powered BI strategy
- Microsoft Fabric consulting
- Power BI modeling, UX optimization, and governance
- Data engineering + unified semantic layer architecture
- End-to-end analytics automation
With 100+ successful data projects across the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC, Addend Analytics helps BI teams evolve from dashboards to AI-driven insights that accelerate business decisions.
Custom tooltips may seem like a small design enhancement, but in reality, they:
- Improve user experience
- Reduce visual clutter
- Enable deeper insights
- Support intelligent decision-making
By combining your existing Power BI capabilities with advanced visualization strategies and AI-driven enhancements, your analytics ecosystem becomes more intuitive, scalable, and impactful.
Addend Analytics can help your teams implement these best practices and take your dashboards to the next level with AI and Microsoft Fabric.
