PL-300 – Section 5: Part 1 Level 4: Adding more control to your visualizations Part 6

52. Tooltip Pages

In the past few videos, we’ve had a look at things like drill through, which allow you to go to a secondary chart, and we’ve seen buttons and actions, which equally allow you to go to various links. But what if we wanted not to go anywhere but just to have more information to hand?

Now, Tooltips are little pieces of information that come up when you hover over objects. And most of the time, they are automatically controlled. So, for instance, if I hover over this visualisation, you can see the date, the region name, the sales volume and it allows you, invites you to drill through, which of course, you can do. But what if you wanted something different?

Well, you can specify a sheet, an entire sheet to operate as a Tooltip. Now, one problem with this, of course, is that we can’t have an entire sheet on top of another sheet because you wouldn’t be able to see the sheet behind. So, this sheet that’s going to be used as a tooltip is going to be quite small.

So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy this Region Name chart. So, I’m just going to duplicate it and this is going to be called Tooltip. And the way to specify that this entire sheet is going to be a tooltip is by not clicking on any visualisation, so if you’re seeing the Axis and if you’re seeing this Analytics, then you need to deselect that.

And then go to the format, which formats for the entire page, and go to Page information. And we have Tooltip. So, the name at the moment is Tooltip but that doesn’t mean anything. You can have any name you want. And it doesn’t make it a tooltip, it doesn’t not make it a tooltip. But what makes it a Tooltip is this. This little Tooltip on/off in Page information. So, I’m going to put it on. And that is literally all you completely need to do.

There are a few steps more that it would be advisable to take but let’s just see how this actually operates as a Tooltip. So, let’s go back to my Page 1 and go to this visualisation here. And I’m going to say that I want this Tooltip to be on. Now, it’s going to be a default type at the moment, and no idea what the computer will do when it hovers over it. So, this is what it does. But I’m going to change this type from Default to a Report page if it’s one of these pages. But the only pages it will give me a list of is any pages that you have specified as a tooltip.

So, I’m going to now rename this as Tooltip Page just so you can see that I could have named it anything. It’s not the name, it’s what’s in Page information, which makes it a tooltip page. So, now, if I hover over anything in this visualisation with this tooltip set to the Tooltip Page, let’s see what happens.

And here you can see the problem with having such a massive tooltip. Yes, it’s giving me the information but I can barely see the information. Now, this would be great if you had a huge screen. However, I’m recording this so that most people can see it at a reasonable resolution. So, I need to decrease my screen size for this page.

So, let’s go back into this page and I think that’s probably a bit too much information for what I want. So, I’m going to get rid of let’s say every visualisation bar this one. Now, let’s reduce the size of it, size of the page. And again, I go to Page information and Page Size. Now, you’ll see that there is a Type here. This is set up for type 16 to nine, what used to be called wide screen when you were talking about televisions but now it’s the norm.

Four to three was the old version of what TVs used to look like. But I want to show you Tooltip. I mean, you can specify any pixel width and height by going to Custom but I want to show you what Tooltip looks like. Tooltip gives me a window which is very small. 320 by 240 pixels and you can’t actually see everything. So, let’s just go back and drag this visualisation up. So, let’s drag it. Let’s maybe resize it. Let’s resize this one because this was going way out of the size. And now, let’s change this page size back to tooltip size.

Now, it should be noted that this is just a suggestion for size. It isn’t mandatory and you can have whatever size you want. I’m going to also change this so that the font size is a lot-lot smaller. And if you’re wondering why it’s not actually spaced so that you can see it all, there’s actually an extra line, which if I decrease it, you can see the category name. So, I don’t want the category name. So, I’m going to switch the category name to Off and that makes it a bit more centralised. So, equally, with these, you can see, we’ve got warning signs saying far too big. So, let’s change this down to… The minimum we can do I think is eight point and we might need to change some other things. Maybe, the title needs change and that sort of thing. But these are all little things that you can do once you have set up what you want. So, I think maybe the legend or so could do with coming down a bit.

But there are certain limits you can’t go below in any case. So, let’s say we’ve now set up this tooltip to be exactly as you want. Well, let’s go back into Page 1 and see what happens. So, if I hover over something and now, you can see, it’s a much more reasonable tooltip. Is it a bit too small, maybe but if you can design so that it is small, then hopefully, you’ll be able to get what information you want to give to the user without actually having to use drill through, or buttons, or actions? This gives you an entire additional level of information.

Now, there’s one thing I must stress. Going back into this Tooltip Page, the name doesn’t mean it’s a Tooltip and going into Page size and selecting Tooltip here doesn’t make it a tooltip either. It’s only page information and tooltip. So, it’s a bit maybe misleading that we have a page size of tooltip but this doesn’t actually make it a tooltip. You can have non-tooltips, which are this size. I don’t know when you’d want to use it, perhaps, but you can have it. The thing that makes a thing a tooltip is by clicking on Tooltip in Page information.

Now, you don’t actually have to use tooltips, anywhere. Obviously, it’d be a waste if you don’t but if you did, you would go to Tooltip and say Report page and then you can say just Auto so the computer would select what it thinks the best tooltip is. Or you can say Type, Default and again, leave the computer completely to select what you’d like. But tooltips allow you to create additional, on-demand analysis that might be quite good for the end user. So tooltips, very simple to set up. You might want to hide the page. So, right and click and Hide so that when it’s published onto Power BI Server that you won’t actually be able to see it. Obviously, you can see it in Power BI Desktop, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to edit it.

So, tooltips, easy to set up, very useful if you have everything in it that will give additional value, additional analysis that’s useful for the end user. And as you can see, you can set up a single tooltip and use it in multiple visualisations. So, these are tooltips.

53. Page and Bookmark Navigator

In previous videos, we created buttons and shapes that we could use for navigation purposes. So, I could hyperlink a particular sheet to a shape for instance. We also had a look at bookmarks which allowed us to be able to set certain things selected. So, what I’m going to do in this video is create some more navigators. But this time there will be one navigator for all of pages and one navigator for bookmarks. So, what I’m going to do is create two new pages and I’m going to hide one of the pages. So, I’ll call this the hidden page. You’ll see why later. So, in this page five, this could be my title page. And I want a list of all of the pages.

Well, I can do this by going to Insert, Buttons, Navigator, Page Navigator. So, here you can see all of the pages which are listed. Now, in fact, it’s not all of the pages. We haven’t got our two tip page listed. So, we can hide certain pages. If I go into format visual, you can see that I can show hidden pages and I can show two tip pages on and off. So, if I didn’t want this hidden page to be shown, then I can hide show hidden pages. So, if I wanted to go to a particular page, I would hold down Ctrl and click on that page. Once it’s uploaded to the Power BI Service then I don’t need to press Ctrl, I could just click.

Now, I can also insert another button, another navigator And this is the Bookmark Navigator. So, this shows all of the bookmarks that I have created. And again, what I can do is just click on one, Ctrl click on one in Power BI Desktop. And here you can see that particular bookmark being shown.

Now, there’s quite a few properties that you can use with this. So, I’m just going to move this bookmark one right down to the bottom and I’m going to show a lot more height because one of the things that might be useful is to change the layout from being horizontal to being vertical. So, this could be at a side of a page. It could be at the side of all of the pages, if you inserted it into each page and then you see highlighted where you are each time.

A look at the other options or style that allows you to change the text fill, bolder shadow and glow. So, we’ve had a look at that in previous videos and you can change it for the default. And when you hover over a button, when you press it, and for the one that is selected. So, I could change, for instance, the border for the one that is selected to a red outline, for instance. So, it’s very subtle if I change it so that it is a bit thicker. There you can see the border. I can also change the rotation. So, I suppose I wanted a bit of a rotation. I can do that. I’ll just rotate the shape or the text though I don’t use this that often. What I use a bit more is the shape. So, this is just a straightforward rectangle.

So, if I just drag it slightly away from the edge, you can see there are straightforward rectangles. But you might want to use for instance, a rounded rectangle. So, you can say I want a small rounding or a big rounding or you can have them as pillars which is even bigger rounding. Arrows, so this could be more useful if I had the grid as a horizontal grid. So, let’s put that at the top. And I probably want to have two rows because I couldn’t see everything here. So, this now changes to a grid orientation. So, I can change the number of rows and columns. I could also have chevron arrows, pentagon arrows and sniped taps. So, you can see it is a rectangle with a small bit cut off, one of the corners.

I can also have speech bubbles and right triangles as some examples of various rectangles that you can use. We’ve got similar options for the bookmark navigator. So in terms of shape, rotation, style and grid layout. But we’ve also got this bookmark section instead of pages. And here, instead of just saying, I want hidden or tool tip pages to be shown or not shown, I can say I want an entire group to be shown in this bookmark navigator. So at the moment, I have bookmarks for overall and then a group of yearly views, which contain these three views. So, what I could say is, I just want one particular group to be shown in this case, yearly views. I can also allow deselection. So, I can say I want the user to be able to not select any of them. And when they are deselected, then I want a different bookmark to be launched. So, if I click on 2004 again or Ctrl and click, then it deselects 2004 and launches the overall bookmark.

So, these are navigators. So, you can use them to show every page. So, you can hide hidden pages or two tip pages and you can show bookmarks or a group of bookmark. And you do this by going to Insert, Buttons, Navigator.