- Feature
- Actions on reports and pages can now inherit tooltips
- Availability
- Generally available (October 2026)
- Industry focus
- Hospitality (hotels, restaurant groups and venues)
Hospitality businesses run on people, and people change jobs often. A hotel group or restaurant chain might train new purchasing clerks, bookkeepers and site managers on Business Central every few months. On-screen help is the cheapest training tool there is. Business Central 29.0 makes it much easier to keep that help consistent.
The industry challenge
Hospitality back offices have some distinctive traits:
- High turnover. Site administrators and junior finance staff move on frequently.
- Many sites, shared processes. Each property or outlet follows the same purchasing, stock and closing routines.
- Custom actions. Many groups have extensions that add actions for things like stock takes, supplier orders and daily takings reports.
Tooltips, the short descriptions that appear when you hover over a button, are a big part of how new staff learn what each action does. But developers have to write a tooltip for every action. When the same report or page is opened from five different places, the tooltip is often written five times, slightly differently, or not at all.
Inconsistent help leads to inconsistent behaviour. A new site manager clicks the wrong report at month-end because two similar actions had vague or missing descriptions.
What Microsoft delivered in Business Central 29.0
In Business Central 29.0, tooltips defined on page or report objects are inherited by the actions that run those objects. Microsoft's point is simple: you write a good description once, and it appears everywhere the object is used.
An MVP walk-through adds the detail. Pages can now carry their own ToolTip and ToolTipML properties, which reports already supported. When an action runs a page and has no tooltip of its own, it inherits the page's tooltip. If an action does have its own tooltip, that one still wins. The page-level properties need AL runtime 18.0 or later.
Where the value shows up
| Business area | Impact for a hospitality group |
|---|---|
| Onboarding | New staff get clear, consistent help on every action |
| Training cost | Less one-to-one coaching on "what does this button do?" |
| Errors | Fewer wrong reports run and fewer wrong pages opened at critical moments |
| Development cost | Developers write each description once |
| Multi-language sites | ToolTipML supports translated help across countries |
The link between tooltips and operations is easy to underestimate. In a business where new people run month-end at remote sites, every clear description reduces the chance of a costly mistake.
A worked scenario
Consider a hotel group with 12 properties (an illustrative example). Its Business Central extension adds a "Daily Revenue Reconciliation" page. That page can be opened from the role centre, from the bank account card and from a custom navigation menu.
Before 29.0, two of those three actions had tooltips, written by different developers in different words. The third had none. New property accountants regularly opened the wrong page or asked head office what the action did.
With Business Central 29.0, the developer writes one clear tooltip on the page itself, in English and French for the group's properties in Canada. All three actions inherit it. New staff see the same description wherever they find the action, and head office gets fewer calls.
Adoption considerations
- Audit your custom pages and reports. Add strong tooltips at object level, then remove duplicate action-level text where it adds nothing.
- Write for a new starter. Describe what the page or report does and when to use it, not how it was built.
- Use ToolTipML for multi-country groups. Translate once at object level.
- Keep overrides deliberate. Use an action-level tooltip only when the context really changes what the user should expect.
- Plan the runtime upgrade. Page-level tooltips need runtime 18.0 or later, so include this in your 29.0 extension update.
The bottom line
In hospitality, training is never finished, because the team keeps changing. Tooltip inheritance in Business Central 29.0 is a small developer convenience that turns into a real operational benefit. Clear, consistent help on every action makes new staff productive sooner and reduces errors at the sites that matter most.
If your organization runs custom Business Central extensions across many sites, it's worth asking your developer or adviser to include a tooltip review in your next update.
Sources: Microsoft roadmap 573313 · Dynamics 365 Lab: ToolTip and ToolTipML on pages