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Consultant KB for Microsoft Power BI: semantic models, DAX and modelling, Power Query and dataflows, reports and visuals, the service and workspaces, capacity and performance, embedding and integration, governance and security, ALM and deployment, and licensing, plus cross-cutting decision guides. Scoped to Power BI, with Microsoft Fabric covered where it touches Power BI directly. Implementation notes, configuration decisions and the gotchas that bite on real projects. Populated by the daily author agent from the Power BI release plans, docs repo and product blog, plus the author's own consultant notes.

power-bi/04-reports-and-visuals/feature-drillthrough-and-tooltips.md
feature-drillthrough-and-tooltips.mdv1 · history
CurrentApplies to BothUpdated last monthSource Microsoft Learn ↗

What it does

Drillthrough sends a reader from a summary visual to a dedicated page filtered to the item they selected. Report page tooltips do something similar on hover — a small page of visuals appears over the canvas, filtered to the data point under the mouse. Both pass filter context from a source visual to a target page.

Key facts

  • A drillthrough page is defined by dropping fields into the Drillthrough well in the Visualizations pane. Power BI adds a Back button to the page automatically.
  • Drillthrough appears in a visual's right-click menu only when the visual contains the drillthrough field, and only when that field isn't aggregated in the source visual.
  • Multiple fields in the drillthrough well give you compound filtering.
  • Buttons can trigger drillthrough via Action > Drillthrough, and conditional formatting can show or hide the button based on filter context.
  • Cross-report drillthrough works only in the Power BI service, only between reports published to the same workspace, needs matching field names and data types, and must be enabled in the target report's settings.
  • Drillthrough page order in the right-click menu can differ between Desktop and the service — in Desktop it follows the page tab order, after publishing it may not.
  • A tooltip page is a normal page with Canvas Settings set to the Tooltip size template and the Tooltip slider turned on in Page Information, with fields dropped into Tooltip fields.
  • Tooltip pages can be assigned manually per visual through the Tooltips card, or reverted with the Auto option.
  • Report tooltips are not interactive — no slicers, no tabbing, no scrolling. If the reader needs to interact, that's a drillthrough page.
  • On line charts a report tooltip shows one tooltip for all lines, and the legend field doesn't filter it.
  • Not supported in tooltips: Python and R visuals, clusters as tooltip fields, and dashboards. Turning tooltips off for a visual doesn't stop the basic tooltip appearing once that visual is pinned to a dashboard.

When to use / skip

Drillthrough is the right pattern whenever the summary raises an obvious "which ones?" question — a spike in returns, a region under target, a customer with an odd margin. It keeps the overview clean and puts the detail one right-click away. Tooltip pages are for enrichment: a sparkline, a couple of supporting measures, context that would clutter the main page. Don't put anything load-bearing in a tooltip, because hover is a poor interaction for anyone using a keyboard, a touchscreen, or a mouse with limited motor control — Microsoft's accessibility guidance says the same thing outright.

Configuration decisions

  • Which fields go in the drillthrough well, and therefore what granularity the detail page assumes.
  • Whether drillthrough is discoverable by right-click alone or exposed with a button, which most readers find far more obvious.
  • Whether cross-report drillthrough is worth the workspace and field-naming constraints, or whether one report with more pages is simpler.
  • Tooltip canvas size, and whether the content fits without scrolling — because it can't scroll.
  • Whether tooltip pages are auto-matched by field or manually assigned per visual, which matters when a visual contains two fields that both have tooltip pages.
  • Whether drillthrough and tooltip pages are hidden from the page tab strip. They almost always should be.

Gotchas

  • The drillthrough option missing from the right-click menu is nearly always one of two things: the field isn't in the source visual, or it's aggregated there.
  • Filters that don't apply as expected usually trace back to relationship direction, or to the field being transformed or duplicated in Power Query so it isn't the same column any more.
  • Cross-report drillthrough fails silently on the smallest mismatch in field name or data type between reports.
  • A tooltip page left visible in the tab strip shows up as a strange little page for every reader.
  • Tooltip pages that reference a measure the visual doesn't share can render blank, and there's no error to tell you why.
  • Blank drillthrough pages after publish are often a page-order or permission issue, not a filter issue.

Consultant notes

  • Add a drillthrough button rather than relying on right-click. Readers who don't know right-click exists will conclude the detail isn't available.
  • Put a card on every drillthrough page showing what it's filtered to. Without it, screenshots of the page are meaningless out of context.
  • Warn clients that cross-report drillthrough ties reports to a shared workspace and to identical field naming. That constraint outlives the person who agreed to it.
  • Keep tooltip pages small and static. Every extra visual on a tooltip is a query that runs on hover, and it shows.

Worth rechecking after publish — drillthrough menu order and cross-report behaviour differ between Desktop and the service.

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