Knowledge Base
Zebra BI for Power BI

Using Report Page Tooltips

Tooltips are a great way to provide additional insights to the report viewer. In Power BI, there are two types of tooltips. There’s the default tooltip that does provide a few more details and there are report page tooltips that can deliver much more details and insights as they can show additional dimensions that aren’t even part of the visual.

All Zebra BI visuals support report page tooltips. Since the report page tooltips are actually designed on a separate page in the Power BI report, there are endless possibilities of what you show in the tooltip and how you design hit. 

In this article, we’ll be using a very popular Zebra BI Demo report to show you one example of what can be done with a report page tooltip.

Watch how to create and design report page tooltips in Power BI.

Let’s look at the differences between the default and the report page tooltip. This is what the default tooltip looks like. So when the user hovers over April, the values of April are shown in the tooltip. This tooltip is generated automatically and can’t be modified by the user.

On the other hand, a report page tooltip can provide many more insights. In this example, the selected Category (Audio) and variance (+16) are split by Country in the tooltip so the user can see how much of the total variance is coming from which country. Also, note that the tooltip dynamically shows the selected category (Audio) on top. To learn how to do this, take a look at this article about dynamic titles.

Let’s take a look how to set up report page tooltips

1. Create a new report page

Click on the + symbol in the bottom right corner of the report to add a new page. 

2. Rename, move and hide the page

To be able to easily identify tooltip pages, we recommend adding the word Tooltip or TT to the name and move the page near the page where the tooltip is used. To rename the page, right-click and select rename. To move the page, just drag and drop to the place where it should be. Because the user shouldn’t be able to navigate to the tooltip page but only see it as an actual tooltip, make sure to hide the page from the navigation. To do this, right-click the page and select Hide Page.

3. Define as tooltip and change size

You need to let Power BI know that this page is a tooltip page so you need to activate the Tooltip setting in the Page information.

Because tooltip pages are usually smaller in size than a regular page, you also need to reduce the size of the page. In the page size settings, you can use the predefined Tooltip size or if you want to have a different size, you can also select custom and then define the width and height of the page yourself.

In order to see the actual size of the tooltip, you can change the page view setting to the actual size.

4. Design the tooltip page

You can now add the elements which should be shown in the tooltip to the page. Let’s add a Zebra BI Table visual. Because we want to have the result split by Country, we need to add CountryID from the Customers table to the Category. Also, let’s add the AC measure to the Values placeholder and the BU measure to the Plan placeholder.

Of course, you would now update the format settings of this visual so it looks exactly the way you like it but in this article, we’ll just focus on getting the report page tooltip to work and this actually only needs one more step. The video which you can find at the beginning of this article contains some additional styling tips and tricks. 

5. Link the visual to the tooltip page

Now you need to activate this tooltip page to be displayed when the user hovers over the visual on the main page. To do this, select the visual which should display the tooltip, activate the tooltip in the formatting options, and select the page where you have created the tooltip. 

From now on, the report page tooltip is displayed whenever you hover over the visual. As mentioned before, you should still tweak and style your tooltip a bit but since there are endless possibilities. Make sure to check out the visualization section of the Knowledge Base to learn some of the formatting and styling options you have in the Zebra BI visuals.

Now that you know how to use report page tooltips you can improve your reports even more and give the end-user more information just by hovering over a data point in a visual. We hope you enjoy creating tooltip pages and your end-users will love this functionality as well.

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