Tooltips in Power BI

In this post I am going to show how to use a report page as a Tooltip in Power BI. This feature was announced in the March Power BI Desktop Release as preview and is now officially released with the May Power BI Desktop Release. This awesome feature let's you design a custom page and use it afterwards as tooltip for your visuals on another report page!

While the NBA finals has taken place in the last few days Luke is now interested in Basketball and asks himself who has scored the most points in NBA history. Further he is also interested in more stats about all time rankings and would like to create a Power BI report out of it. Finally, he would like to have some additional information when he hovers over a player like his picture, birthday, NBA championship won, and All Stars games played.

A quick Bing search points him to https://stats.nba.com/alltime-leaders/?SeasonType=Regular%20Season where the Top players are listed. That's exactly what he was looking for. Further he created an Excel sheet by himself in which background information for each player is stored. The picture below shows an abstract.

After he connects to the mentioned Web page and to his Excel file he checks the Relationship Model to make sure everything is set up correctly (relationship: Player - Player). Now he builds a line and stacked column chart with following columns: Player as shared axis, 3PM, FGM and FTM as column values and PTS as line values. He decides to sort this visual by PTS.

Now he has an overview who scored the most points in NBA history - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Even so he sees how many Free throws, Field Goals and 3 pointers each player has made till today. But Luke is new to Basketball and do not know how Kareem looks like or one of the other players neither. He is interested what they have achieved and when they are born. So, he would like to show this information in a tooltip.

To do so he creates a new page, renames it to "Player Info" and sets Tooltip to On under Format - Page Information. Only when Tooltip is set to On another visual can see and use it as a tooltip. 

Now he changes the Page Size to Tooltip. If he wouldn't change the page size the tooltip would be just to big. Therefore it makes sense to change it.

Now he creates a table with the picture, Birthday, NBA Champion and All-Star column. To show a URL as a picture Luke needs to change the category of the column to Image URL. To do so he selects the column, hits the Modeling Ribbon and choose Image URL. Further he must define on which column the page should be filtered when the page is used as a tooltip for a visual. In this scenario the column Player is the primary key therefore he drags and drops it to Tooltips (the visual has to be selected).

His next step is to use the Player Info page as tooltip in a visual. So he goes back to his first page, selects the visual and hits format. Under Tooltip he changes the Page to Player Info.

He's already done! Let's test it. Luke hover over Kareem to see further information.

It works! Let's test it for Michael Jordan.

It works again!

Does that mean that Luke has to create for each tooltip one report page? No it doesn't! But how can he combine tooltips to one? I will explain this cool feature in my next post. Stay tuned.