Design Tips

Like many things in Power BI, Power BI Tool Tips functionality evolved so much. I probably do a post on Tool Tips sometime soon. Today it’s about visual header tooltip. While I was working on a project recently, I came across a new ToolTip icon under visual headers. Since then, I have been using a lot, so I thought to blog about it.

Let’s start with what is Tool Tip:

A tooltip is a graphical user interface (GUI) element used in conjunction with the cursor or mouse pointer to display information about an item without needing to click on it. The typical scenario for summoning a tooltip is to hover the mouse cursor over another GUI element such as a tool icon in software application, and it is also prevalently used in websites.
A tooltip is also known as a hint, infotip or screentip.

I think in Power BI, visual header Tool Tip Icon works more like a hint, info tip or screen tip. You can enable this on each visual under Visual Header in Visual properties. This blog post explains how to enable it – https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-june-2019-feature-summary/#headerTooltips

What I want to talk about is use cases:

Visual annotations
Business logic explanation / Calculations
How to navigate around the visual
Show more data related to visual
Anything or everything else

Visual annotations:

When we look at data journalism posts, most of the times they have annotations, explaining what visual showing or talking about measures. Again most of these data storeys are used for paper. But in the digital world, we do see these annotations more interactively. It is nice to have this kind of lil annotations for everyday reporting as well, and Tooltip Icon can be used for that purpose. Another thing is using canvas space wisely, it is important, and having this kind of hint helps us on saving the canvas space.

So following visual, I am using the ToolTip icon to do annotations. When the user clicks on the header tooltip icon, it will show annotations related to visual

Business logic / Calculations explanation:

Another good use case is to explain business logic. In the BI world, everyone works towards a single version of the truth, but many times it’s illusory. Another silly thing is naming conventions, like Microsoft products, in the business as well one metric may mean different things in different teams. So having a bit of explanation about metric can be very very handy and Tooltip icon can be used for it.

In the following visual, I am showing how the total got calculated using the Tooltip icon.

How to navigate around the visual:

Not all visuals are as self-explanatory as helpful bar charts. Many need explanations, not only visuals but with all other extra features like drill down, drill through, Tooltips, etc benefits with a bit of guidance. Again, the ToolTip icon comes handy here.

In the below example, I am using the tooltip icon to show how to navigate around the visual

Show more data related to visual:

Simplicity is the key! When you want to focus on one thing, then showing only that helps. But I am sure there is always this one business user who wants to see that one other metric on the report page.

For example, in the below visual, I want to highlight the trend lines, but the business user also wants to know the number of rows in Male and female. Then that could be something I can show using Tooltip icon

Anything else you want to display 🙂

Hope you enjoyed reading; let me know how you are using this functionality…

Till next time,
Prathy 🙂

A business user came to me asking “how can I get a vertical line on Line Chart in Power BI like my Excel report?”. I was like, “It’s straightforward. We have this analytics pane which lets you add so many types of lines 😊 “. But, quite quickly I understood, I cannot draw a vertical line as we do in Excel or SSRS.

Adding a vertical line or marker to a chart in Power BI

Data looks like below:

The user wants a marker, ideally a line to point those events on the chart. I cannot think of an out the box option, but there are some workarounds. Let’s look at adding a line using Combo Chart. This chart clearly shows events as bars and tooltips can define what kind of event it was. I would prefer to change the bar width. It’s a bar; it’s not exactly a line; however, it fits for the purpose.

Next using Markers:

With latest Power BI update, we can set line stroke width to zero. So I decided to use that feature to highlight the events on the chart. It’s a simple Line Chart with one axis and two values. One value is to show the Value column and other to show Count of Event. My chart looks like this:

Then I updated X Axis type to Categorical (Otherwise, Markers functionality will not be available). Then under Shapes, set Show marker to On, followed by Customize series option to On. Then I turned off marker for Value column, On for Count of Event.

Then I decreased Stoke width to 0 and increased Marker size to 16. Now the chart looks like this:

Tooltip don’t make much sense, but by using new report tool tip pages functionality we can have much more helpful and user-friendly tooltip like below:

Hope this post helps someone out there

Prathy 🙂

Power BI visual header tooltip

Visual annotations:

Business logic / Calculations explanation:

How to navigate around the visual:

Show more data related to visual:

Adding a vertical line or marker to a chart in Power BI

Adding a vertical line or marker to a chart in Power BI