Create visual tooltips

APPLIES TO: Power BI Desktop Power BI service

Visual tooltips in Power BI improve usability, accessibility, and interactivity across visuals. Starting in January 2026, modern visual tooltips are the default for new reports, with theme-based styling and the Actions footer enabled. Existing reports keep their current tooltip settings.

When you hover over a visual data point, a tooltip shows the field name and value. By default, the tooltip displays the fields used in the visual. You can show more fields in the tooltip by adding them to the visual's Tooltip field well. If a visual has these actions available, the tooltip also provides actions like drill down and drill through.

You can turn off the tooltip for any visual in the visual formatting options. If you want full control of a visual tooltip, you can create a visual tooltip report page to use instead of the default tooltip.

Actions footer

The optional tooltip Actions footer shows drill down and up, along with drill through on a data point, without needing to use the right-click menu or the header icons for the visual.

For example, when you hover over the word data point in a bar chart, you can Drill down on the data point or Drill through. If you select Drill down, the visual updates to display the next level in the hierarchy and filter to Word. If you select Drill through, you see which pages you can drill through to. In this example, choose either the Market Basket Analysis or the Category details page.

If you select Market Basket Analysis in the tooltip, you drill through to the Market Basket Analysis page, filtered to Word and any other filters on the source data point.

Upgrade tooltips in existing reports

If an existing report doesn't use modern visual tooltips, a dialog appears when you open the report asking if you want to upgrade.

• Select Upgrade to modern defaults to update all visuals in your report with the Actions footer enabled.
• Select Use old tooltips to keep the tooltips unchanged.

You can also enable or disable the Actions footer at any time by using the Format pane.

Styling and color

For visual tooltips, the report's theme colors determine the styling and color:

• The Background elements color sets the tooltip background.
• The First-level elements color sets the text and icon color.
• The Secondary background elements color sets the separator line and the hover color on the tooltip.

For example, this tooltip uses the Default theme style:

Here's an example with the Innovate theme:

Here's an example with the Frontier theme:

To customize the styling further in Power BI Desktop, update the Tooltip theme in the Customize theme dialog:

You can also format tooltips for each visual by customizing the settings in the Format pane:

Considerations and limitations

The tooltip actions footer isn't available in the following scenarios:

• Report page tooltips
• Custom visuals (AppSource visuals)
• Decomposition trees

Related content

• Create tooltips based on report pages
• Set up drillthrough in Power BI reports