Power BI tooltips recirculate
An interactive Power BI sales dashboard with tooltip details was shared as a practical visualization example, and a classic visualization cheatsheet also recirculated to remind analysts of core chart‑choice rules. (x.com) (x.com).
Power BI users are recirculating two old lessons at once: show more detail on hover, and pick the chart before you polish the dashboard. (learn.microsoft.com) (datacamp.com) Microsoft’s Power BI documentation says report tooltips use a dedicated tooltip page that appears when a user hovers over a data point and filters to that exact point. The feature lets report builders attach one or more fields to the tooltip so a bar, point, or segment can reveal extra context without adding more clutter to the main canvas. (learn.microsoft.com) Microsoft also says visual tooltips can include drill actions, while report page tooltips are filtered by the hovered data point and are meant for fast context inside the same report view. Its design guidance says page tooltips do not support interactivity, and advises drillthrough pages when users need to click and explore further. (learn.microsoft.com 1) (learn.microsoft.com 2) The companion cheatsheet making the rounds pushes a simpler rule set: use line charts for trends over time, bar charts for comparisons, scatter plots for relationships, and maps for geography. DataCamp’s April 22, 2022 cheat sheet organizes chart choice by task, including trend, distribution, composition, and relationship. (datacamp.com) Those two ideas fit together in the way many business dashboards are built. A report can keep the main view to a few key sales measures, then move product, profit, or segment detail into a tooltip instead of squeezing more labels and cards onto the page. (learn.microsoft.com 1) (learn.microsoft.com 2) Microsoft’s current documentation, updated in March 2026, still treats tooltip design as a core report-building feature rather than a niche trick. The setup starts with a new page, a canvas size set to Tooltip, and fields that match the visual the user will hover over. (learn.microsoft.com 1) (learn.microsoft.com 2) The chart-choice half of the discussion has been around even longer. Tools like Data to Viz and Highcharts’ Chart Chooser make the same basic argument as the recirculating cheatsheet: the first decision is the job the chart needs to do, not the decoration added afterward. (data-to-viz.com) (highcharts.com) That is why a hover card in Power BI and a chart-selection cheatsheet keep resurfacing together. One is about hiding detail until the user asks for it; the other is about making sure the first chart on the screen is the right one. (learn.microsoft.com) (datacamp.com)
