Deep dive into tooltip options in Power BI visuals (Generally Available)

Tooltips give consumers context about the data point they're hovering over — the full value, a year-over-year change, a related KPI, a quick explanation — without ever leaving that data point. Power BI offers a flexible set of tooltip options so you can start with the defaults and add as much customization as the report needs.

The options progress from least to most custom:

1. Default visual tooltip — Power BI builds the tooltip from the fields in your visual.
2. Tooltip field well — Add extra fields to enrich the default tooltip.
3. Tooltip fields only and Sentence format only (newly generally available) — Curate the exact field list or write the hover content as a sentence.
4. Report page tooltip — Replace the tooltip entirely with a report page you design.

A separate Help tooltip icon in the visual header gives consumers guidance about the visual itself rather than the data point, and it coexists with whichever data tooltip you pick.

Why does it add additional properties to.PBIR visual.json files that prevent the report from opening in Power BI Desktop?