Not passing context to Tooltip page

[GilbertGotfried]

I have this matrix, the set up looks like this.

And the final report looks like this. For each employee, there is a category of event type, and within each of those, there is a bar for each month.

I built a tooltip page that looks like this.

The issue is that, when I hover over, for example, "Team A / John Doe / Time logged (hours) / the first month bar", like this

the tooltip filters to only display Employee: John Doe and Event type: Time Logged (hours), but then displays all the months in the dataset. If I go to another employee or event type, the tooltip changes and displays only that employee/event type. But every month in the dataset is displayed always.

So no matter what month bar I hover over it shows:

Emplyee Name              MonthBeginDate              Event Type
John Doe                       1/1/2026                          Time logged
John Doe                       2/1/2026                          Time logged
John Doe                       3/1/2026                          Time logged
John Doe                       4/1/2026 etc

If I move to another Employee/Event Type it shows

Emplyee Name              MonthBeginDate              Event Type
Jane Doe                       1/1/2026                          Inbasket messages
Jane Doe                       2/1/2026                          Inbasket messages
Jane Doe                       3/1/2026                          Inbasket messages
Jane Doe                       4/1/2026 etc

I don't understand why it's passing the "hover context" for all the fields except one. Event type is a column like month. Is it something to do with it being a date?  I'm guessing because there's a range of dates in that window, the entire range is the context?

Is there any way around this?  It makes having a tooltip basically useless if there are dates invovled.

[v-achippa]

Hi @GilbertGotfried,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Fabric Community.

Thank you @johnt75 and @kushanNa for the prompt response.

As we haven’t heard back from you, we wanted to kindly follow up to check if the solution provided by the user's for the issue worked? or let us know if you need any further assistance.

Thanks and regards,

Anjan Kumar Chippa

[v-achippa]

Hi @GilbertGotfried,

We wanted to kindly follow up to check if the solution provided by the user's for the issue worked? or let us know if you need any further assistance.

Thanks and regards,

Anjan Kumar Chippa

[kushanNa]

Hi @GilbertGotfried 

Is it possible for you to share a sample pbix file with issue you are facing ? I tried to reproduce your issue , but I was unable to generate the same issue you are facing 

[GilbertGotfried]

I don't believe I can?  Isn't it still true that new users can't post a pbix?

You're doing that in a regular column chart.  I need a matrix for the intersection of employee, task, and date.

Can you turn yours into a matrix and still have it work?  I am making the metric value into a sparkline and making the sparkline a column instead of line.

Like this

It will always display all the months

[kushanNa]

@GilbertGotfried 

Oh, okay. I think I understand what you're trying to do here. You want to interact with each data point in your sparkline bar chart? If that's what you're trying to do, I doubt that this is possible because a sparkline bar chart is more like an image. It applies to the entire cell, and you can't hover over it to see the value of a single bar.

[GilbertGotfried]

Any ideas on some other way to handle this kind of reporting? 

It is honestly shocking to me that PowerBi can not do a simple labeled line/bar chart with more than one thing on it.  This really isn't an incredibly complicated thing to ask a reporting application to do.  

[kushanNa]

@GilbertGotfried 

Yes you can use SVGs to label bar charts in matrix table , attached is the sample I have created 

a quick tutorial if you are new to SVGs : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgyXoXzjff4 

[GilbertGotfried]

SVG isn't PBI Certified, though, can't use it in production.  Is there anything else to use that is certified?

Absolutely, truly, mystifyingly baffling that Power BI can't handle LABELLING A SPARKLINE.

[kushanNa]

Hi @GilbertGotfried 

I’m not quite sure what you mean by not certified. SVG is natively supported in Power BI, so no third-party installation is needed for it to work.

[GilbertGotfried]

Oh sorry, I thought it was one of those vizs you have to import.  

Is there a way to do this without hardcoding the months?

[kushanNa · Accepted solution]

@GilbertGotfried 

Months are not hardcoded in the example I provided, they are added automatically once you have data for the respective month.

[GilbertGotfried]

If I filter the dates to two months I get

Emplyee Name              MonthBeginDate              Event Type
John Doe                       1/1/2026                          Time logged
John Doe                       2/1/2026                          Time logged

So it's passing the full range of filtered dates to the tooltip.  My question is: is there any way around this?  Because this makes having a tooltip completely useless if you have dates in a graph, which is, you know, kind of common.

I have another sparkline graph.  You can't label the sparklines in PBi.  So I figure I can use a tooltip instead.  Nope, displays the entire range of dates.  It is beyond baffling that PBi cannot handle something so basic as a sparkline with numbers.

[johnt75]

You can use the technique described in https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/displaying-filter-context-in-power-bi-tooltips/ to add a filter dump measure to your tooltip. That will show you exactly what is being passed to the tooltip as a filter and it should help you work out what is going wrong.