DA-100 Microsoft Power BI – Level 4: Adding more control to your visualizations Part 4

12. 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 you wanted not to go anywhere, but just to have more information to hand? Now, Tool Tips are little pieces of information, 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 visualization, you can see the date, the region name, 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 tool tip. 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 visualization. So if you’re seeing the access 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 Tool Tip.

So the name at the moment is Tool Tip. 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 Tool tip 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 or that it would be advisable to take, but let’s just see how this actually operates as a Tool tip. So let’s go back to my page one and go to this visualization here. And I’m going to say that I want this Tool Tip 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. In other words, 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 Tool Tip 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 Tooltip Page. So now if I hover over anything in this visualization 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 more people can see it as 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 visualization bar this wong. 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 widescreen 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 Tool tip looks like. Tooltip gives me a window which is very small, 320 x 240 pixels and you can’t actually see everything. So let’s just go back and drag this visualization up. So let’s drag it. Let’s maybe resize it. Let’s resize this one because this is 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 a 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 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 it’s 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 centralized. 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 of the things maybe the title needs to 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 also 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 one and see what happens.

So if I hover over something and now you can see it’s a much more reasonable tool tip. Is it a bit too small? Maybe. But if you can design so that it is small then hopefully you will be able to get to 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 tool tip. So it’s a bit maybe misleading that we have a page size of Tool tip but this doesn’t actually make it a tooltip. You can have nontool tips 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 page a tooltip is by clicking on Tooltip in page information. Now, you don’t actually have to use Tooltips anywhere. Obviously it would be a waste if you don’t. But if you did you would go to Tool Tip 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 would like. But Tooltips allow you to create additional on demand analysis that might be quite good for the end user. So Tool tips, 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 of why you wouldn’t be able to edit it. So two tips, easy to set up, very useful if you have everything in it that will give additional value, additional analysis sys that’s useful for the end user. And as you can see, you can set up a single tool tip and use it in multiple visualizations. So these are two tips.

13. Practice Activity Number 4 – The Solution

So how well did you do in this practice activity? So you notice that we are starting to create dashboards. Now. We’re using what we have learnt to bring together various analyses. So first of all, we need to connect to the Power Bi data workbook and to the practice activity CDs. So on the first page we’re going to create a table which summarizes the year of date created and the size. So, fairly easy to start off with, but it’s always good to be able to see the actual data that we’ve got. Now, I’m not going to be saying throughout all of these practice activities that you should style it in a particular way. This is for you to develop how you want the end presentation to look to the user, but you must make sure, for instance, that things are visible, preferably they’ve got titles on that sort of thing. And at the end, I’ll give you an example of how this dashboard could be stylized.

So I need to copy and paste it so that it becomes a stacked line chart. So you can see this really needs a fair bit of weight. So I’m going to put it down here only temporarily and I’m going to copy it again. And this one becomes a month chart. So not any year, just which month. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to put this one over here, the table over to the right hand side. I’m going to put the year one up here, above the month one. I’m going to give them plenty of space. I’ll probably bring this down just a bit because I’m going to put the slicer there that we’re going to create later. So, here we are. We have got this nuts. Originally in its original source, I’ve accidentally clicked on size, which we’re going to be doing later. So filter the table. So this is a visual photo, as opposed to a page filter or a report filter, so that it shows only those ten items with the top ten values by size.

So we’re not doing it based on the year, so we’re not doing the top ten items based by size, because that will give us all of the ten years or nine years that we’ve got. So it’s not actually going to change anything. Instead we want to do an item level photo. So I have got here an item level field. In truth, any field would do as long as it was not summarized. So I’m going to drag this into the filters on this visual and I’m going to say I want the top ten items when you look at it by size, so you can see that we’ve got six items remaining, six years remaining.

There are ten items in total, but some of those are on additional years, so the same year, and we can prove that, but with the next item, which is drag this hash or pound sign into the values well and we don’t want it to be summarized. So now you can see we have got ten rows plus the total row. And again, there’s lots of things you could do with this. We could change the field formatting for the size and display it in millions. For example. The next thing we need to do is to sort the table in descending order of size. So we can do that very quick, quickly, by just clicking on size. If you want to do a bit more slowly, we can click on these three dots and sort by size. And you can see there’s a little line next to the size which shows how it’s already sorted and sort descending.

Again, there’s a little line next to it to show that that’s already happening. Next we’re going to add a new visualization, a slicer, and this slicer is going to be based on the year of date created. And then we’re going to slice the years 2010 to 2014. Again, lots of formatting you might want to do. It’s very difficult for me to actually see the numerical inputs, so let’s get those up to a bigger size. For instance. So I want to slice it to 2010 to 2014. And now we need to create a bookmark based on this. Now, notice when I do that, all of the visualizations in this page change. So we’re going to create a bookmark based on this and we’re going to view BOOKMARKS pane and we’re going to add this bookmark. So let’s rename it as 2010 to 2014 and we’ll just do it on the selected visual. In other words, this one visual here. So now we reslice on 2006 or 2019 and we add that as a bookmark and then reslice on all of it. And that is a bookmark. So now we can go from one bookmark to another very easily. But I think I didn’t have the right visualization selected for this all year.

So I’m going to just change it and update. So now it should work. There we go. So on a second page we need to create an area chart based on so let’s get an area chart that’s stacked. Area chart or area chart. There we go. And this is going to be based on date created, year and month in the axis and file extension in the legend and size in the values. And then I want to actually show the months. At the moment, all you can see are the years. There’s one value per year, but if I click on Expand all down one level in the hierarchy, we can see multiple data points for each year. Now add a drill through on the second page for date created year, which means from the other pages, page one. In this particular example, we can go to page two with a drill through for year.

Now a back arrow has just appeared and arranged a visualization. So there’s not actually any overlap. So you can see there’s an overlap right now. So one thing you could do is just move this down, for instance, but it’s a bit small, this arrow. So I want you to add a button text of back. So here’s our button text and there we have the word back. It makes it a bit more prominent. Now, I’ve also asked you to rename this second page break down by month. Currently you can see it’s broken down by year as well. But when we go back to the dashboard and rename this, we’ll click on the 2010 to 2014 bookmark and then we can drill from 2014, we can drill through to the breakdown by month. And here you can see the MP3 and the M four B and the WMA. And I think I’ve asked you actually to do it for the year 2011. So let’s do that. So that’s a more connected dashboard or graph.

Now, why not experiment with making this dashboard nice because at the moment it’s usable. Why not, for instance, change the theme to Frontier, for instance? Already it’s just starting to get a little bit of something there. We could be adding titles, we can be formatting numbers, we could be making data labels and much more. So here is an example of how you can stylize it in this frontier style. So you can see we’ve got some white titles on dark green backgrounds, lighter green backgrounds. In the actual graph, we’ve got everything sized right. So this is just the right length to the width to get here into the top ten and then break down by month. You can stylize that a bit more. Maybe we don’t want to see April 2010 because there aren’t any values for it.

So instead of it being continuous, it could be categorical. So there’s our two values. And then we’re going to 2010 and we break down by month. So there’s lots of ways to stylize this the dashboard. Now, it needs to be brought together in a sense of unity, sense of style. You can see I’ve added in data labels, I’ve changed the font size, so you can see various things. So why not have a play and see what works for you stylistically? Now, save this dashboard, because we will be using this in the next practice activity. So I hope you enjoyed this particular practice activity and are going to have some fun creating a dashboard just as you’re on how you want to style it yourself. In the next section, we will be looking at other visualizations and then we will go back to this dashboard and change a few of the visualizations to the newer ones that we’ve.