In the world of analytics, one of the simplest yet effective options for helping user engagement and understanding at the dashboard level is to build custom tooltips. The tooltip functionality in Power BI allows developers and analyst to provide the user with valuable insights and information without taking up too much of the objective space on the report. Tooltips can be designed and built to present other information, context, navigational calculations, and other visuals, that only appear when the user hovers over data points.
Out of the box tooltips only provide limited information such as category name, and value of the data point hovered upon. Custom tooltips can be created just like report pages, so developers can add charts, KPIs, and DAX measures that will be able to fit into a smaller space on a report that correlates to the data points selected by the user. This means there is the ability to story layer, meaning a user can see a higher level visual leaving clarity on the dashboard, but detailed observations can always be just one hover away. Instead of going to numerous pages or applying and resetting multiple filters to get your answer, custom tooltips allow the reporting results experience to be more classically styled and dynamic without the constant need to jump around the report.
It has become increasingly common for students who attend Power BI Classes in Pune to learn about custom tooltip functionality in their reporting repertoire. Most of these Power BI classes discuss real-world scenarios in which viewable tooltip pages are valuable, for example, when viewing a bar chart to see the breakdown of profit margins behind that chart, or showing the year-over-year (YoY) comparisons of the selected year within a tooltip on the action of hovering over the sales trend. While the students learn how to create tooltip pages, they also learn how to construct them with the user’s experience in mind. When implemented correctly, a tooltip is a mini dashboard that exists in the context of the main visual but relates specifically to the data contained in the tooltip.
Custom tooltips can be created as present day dashboards that respond to user selections, for example, where filters and slicers apply to the main report page, and the contents of the tooltip respond with the appropriate information related to the explored data itself. For example, if the user is analyzing regional sales numbers and hovering over a state on a map, we could show a custom tooltip that presents product category numbers or customer acquisition statistics for that state alone, thereby delivering contextualised intelligence. One of the reasons Power BI is set apart from other modern business intelligence tools is that Power BI enhances dashboards beyond static visualizations into defined user guided experiences.
Participants in a comprehensive Power BI Training in Pune get introduced to some of the more sophisticated applications of custom tooltips, for example, using bookmarks for improved interactivity or informing those tooltips’ content using measures to provide conditional format. This is possibly the most advantageous in an executive dashboard where the requirement is to provide clarity with little complexity. By using either small-multiple visuals, conditional visuals, or multi-card visualizations in the tooltip page developers can allow users to drill into meaningful insights, whilst maintaining the sophistication of the design layout of the main report page. In other words, it provides a balance to the amount of detail provided while still making the natural flow easy to consume.
In a standard report, the user is frequently required to drill deeper, or click throw multiple layers before being able to view granular data, and that can add time and create distractions for the user. This is an advantage custom tool-tips do away with, by allowing relevant detail to be shown outright to the user, in an integrated fashion. By way of example, whether it’s a view of their top performing products, showing a trend in a specific region of a product line, or bringing to the surface the explanation for anomalies in the data, these different types of tool-tips provide that narrative feature, without overloading the viewer. And – of course, that smart interactivity increases attention and engagement, resulting in improved understanding of the data as well.
During the full Power BI Course in Pune, the students investigate performance around tooltips and learn how to optimize visuals and queries to eliminate performance challenges. The course emphasizes designing tooltip pages perfectly as well, as to only include elements that provide value for the analysis. Students actively engage in designing and testing custom tooltips in cases such as sales analysis, financial reporting, or monitor operations, to build the skills required to put this all into practice in a enterprise environment.
In summary, custom tooltips are an important aspect of design for any modern Power BI reports. They allow for report readers to include more detail, context, and therefore, interactive, user experience on a dashboard, without sacrificing simplicity or real estate. By and large, tooltip pages will allow organizations to delivery analytics with more finesse to readers. Custom tooltips can further enhance operational reports, executive summary, etc and can help tell the story of the data. As data continues to become more complex, these tooltips will continue to be important for providing insight that is not only visible – it makes sense.
