Let’s set the scene. You’ve built a wonderful, useful, and descriptive report for your stakeholders with a variety of tooltips that offer deeper insights. They love the tooltips, and have requested more for other visuals, but when they get to the boardroom to present, they are unable to hover over any numbers without the tooltip blocking the context of that data point. Because they love the tooltips for their personal exploration, they don’t want them disabled permanently and have requested a way to temporarily turn them off for presentations. This blog was inspired by Steve Hughes (you may know him) complaining about “too many tooltips in the way of my data”.
This one is for you, Dad.
Tooltips are useful for personal exploration, but not shared exploration.
Process
1. Download the images from GitHub:
2. Open your Power BI report and create a duplicate page for the page you would like to disable tooltips on. To do this, right click on the page and select “Duplicate Page”.
3. Rename the new page something like “[original page name] – No Tooltip” by right-clicking on the new page tab. We are also going to hide this page.
4. Next, navigate to the View tab in the upper ribbon and select the “Selection” pane. This will bring up a list of all the visuals on your page.
5. Click to your first visual in the list with a tooltip and in the “Visualizations” pane navigate to the “General” setting to toggle “Tooltip” to off.
6. Repeat by clicking down the list in the selection pane and Power BI will keep opening the Visualization pane to the General tab for easy toggling. Pretty slick. Keep repeating until all your visuals have this toggle turned off. Keep in mind, not all your all your visuals have a tooltip like titles, text boxes, etc.
To close the selection panel, select “Selection” in the upper ribbon to close that panel or select the “X” at the top of that panel.
7. Time to add our icon! Go to “Insert” in the top ribbon and select “Image” then choose the downloaded icon for magnifying glass without check box. This will signal to end users that there are no tooltips turned on for this page.
8. After resizing and positioning the magnifying glass, in the “Visualization” pane turn on Action and select Type “Page navigation” & set Destination for your original page (Overview in this example). I also turn on Tooltip (the only one for this entire page promise!) for this and instruct users to “Click here to turn on tooltips”.
9. Finally, go back to your original page and repeat steps 7 and 8 with the magnifying glass with a check mark to signify tooltips are on. To your end users, this will feel like a button and by keeping visuals on a separate page, you’ll see a minimal impact to performance.
PRO TIP
To have a true button experience, use the “Properties” section of the “General” tab in the “Visualizations” pane to have the visuals align perfectly and be the exact same size.
