Custom Tooltips and Chart Markers

A chart has two layers of information: what you see, and what you get when you look closer. The visible layer should stay ruthlessly simple. The tooltip is where all the detail you didn't want cluttering the canvas gets to live.

Most dashboards ship with whatever the default tooltip happens to be. Ten minutes of configuration turns it into the most information-dense part of the whole page.

Choosing what appears on hover

Open a chart's properties and find the Tooltip section. You get direct control over the contents:

The key move is hiding the defaults you don't need. A tooltip repeating the axis label the user is already pointing at wastes a line. Switch off everything that isn't earning its place, and what remains reads as a deliberate message rather than a data dump.

Custom text that interpolates step fields

This is the part worth learning properly. The custom text box isn't static — you can reference fields from the step, and the tooltip substitutes the actual value for the hovered data point.

That means instead of a bare stack of label/value pairs, you can write a sentence:

closed across deals this quarter.

Hover a bar and you get a readable statement about that specific bar. It costs a couple of minutes and it changes how non-analysts experience the chart — they're reading a fact, not decoding a data structure.

There's also a show null values option. Turn it on when a missing value is itself meaningful ("no activity logged"), and off when blanks are just noise that make the tooltip look broken.

Tooltips as inline help

Here's a use most people miss: a tooltip doesn't have to describe the data at all. It can explain the chart.

Dashboards accumulate metrics whose definitions live in somebody's head. Pipeline coverage, weighted forecast, adjusted attainment — every org has three of them and no two people define them the same way. Put that definition in the custom tooltip text and the answer sits exactly where the question gets asked: on the chart, at the moment of confusion.

Keep it short, though. A tooltip is a glance, not a page. If your explanation needs three paragraphs, it belongs in a text widget or a linked page — and it's probably a sign the metric itself needs simplifying.

Chart markers

Tooltips are on-demand. Sometimes you need the opposite: something permanently visible, attached to one specific point on the chart, that says "look here".

That's a chart marker — an annotation you pin to an individual bar, column, or data point. In the chart's properties you choose the point to mark and then configure three things:

Markers are for the story behind the number, the thing the data can't tell you itself:

• The month revenue dipped because a major account churned — mark it, so nobody re-investigates it every quarter.
• The quarter you changed the methodology, so the reader knows a step-change isn't a real trend.
• The record-breaking week worth calling out rather than leaving to be noticed.

Used sparingly — one or two per dashboard — markers are the closest thing CRM Analytics has to a footnote, and they stop the same question being asked every month.

Your charts now explain themselves. Next we shrink them right down and build the row of indicators that sits at the top of every good dashboard: KPI micro charts.