How to Change Format in Power BI

Power BI's default styling is clean, but it rarely matches your company's branding or highlights the key story your data is trying to tell. Changing the format of your charts, tables, and report pages is the key to transforming a basic dashboard into a polished, professional, and easy-to-understand analytical tool. This tutorial will walk you through the essential formatting options in Power BI, from adjusting a single chart's color to applying a theme across your entire report.

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Finding Your Formatting Tools: The Format Pane

Nearly all your formatting work in Power BI will happen in the Format pane. To access it, first select a visual on your report canvas. Once a visual is highlighted, look to the right-hand side of your screen where you see the Visualizations pane. Click on the paintbrush icon to open the Format pane.

This pane is typically divided into two main tabs:

• Visual: Contains formatting options specific to the selected chart type. For example, a bar chart will have options for Columns and Data labels, while a line chart will have options for Lines and Markers.
• General: Contains formatting options that apply to the visual's container, regardless of chart type. This includes settings like the Title, Effects (background color, borders, shadows), Header icons, and Tooltips.

Getting comfortable navigating these two tabs is the first step to mastering Power BI formatting.

How to Format Specific Visuals

The best reports use different visuals to tell different parts of a story, and each one requires a slightly different formatting approach. Let's cover the most common visuals and how to style them effectively.

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Formatting Bar and Column Charts

Bar and column charts are arguably the most common visuals in business reporting. Here's how to make them shine.

1. Changing Colors

The default blue is functional but boring. To change it:

• Select your bar or column chart.
• In the Format pane, go to the Visual tab.
• Expand the Columns or Bars section.
• Under Colors, click the color swatch next to "Default color" to choose a new color for all bars.
• To color each bar differently based on its category, toggle "Show all" on and assign a color to each category individually.

2. Formatting Data Labels and Axes

By default, users have to guess the exact value of a bar by looking at the axis. Adding data labels makes your chart much clearer.

• In the Visual tab of the Format pane, find the Data labels section and switch the toggle to "On."
• Expand the Data labels section to customize the font, text color, display units (e.g., thousands, millions), and position (e.g., inside end, outside end).
• To format the X or Y axis, expand the X-axis or Y-axis sections. Here you can turn the axis title on or off, change the font and color of the axis labels, and adjust the range.

Formatting Line Charts

Line charts are perfect for showing trends over time. Proper formatting can help emphasize those trends.

• Lines: Under the Visual tab, expand the Lines section. From here, you can change the line color for each series, adjust the stroke width (thickness), and change the line style from solid to dashed or dotted.
• Markers: By default, Power BI may not show markers for each data point. Turn them on under the Markers section. You can then change their shape (circle, square, diamond), size, and color to make individual points stand out.
• Area Shading: To turn a line chart into an area chart, toggle on the Shade area option. You can control the transparency of the shading to make it more subtle or prominent.

Formatting Tables and Matrices

Don't neglect your tables! A well-formatted table is much easier to read than a wall of black-and-white text.

• In the Format pane, click the Visual tab. You'll see a long list of elements you can format.
• Column headers: Change the font color, background color, and alignment (left, center, right) to make your headers stand out from the data.
• Values: Customize the font and background colors for the data in the cells. It's often helpful to apply alternating background colors for rows (also known as banded rows) to improve readability, which can be done in the Values section.
• Totals: In the Totals section, you can format the grand total row separately from the rest of the table, making it bold or giving it a different background color.
• Specific Columns formatting: If you only want to format one column, scroll down to the Apply to specific columns section. In 'Series Drop down', you can choose the columns that you would like.
• Conditional Formatting: This is the superpower of table formatting. We'll cover it in more detail below, but you can access it here by expanding the Cell elements section. This lets you apply data bars, color scales, or icons to cells based on their values.

Report-Level Formatting for Consistency

Formatting every visual one by one is time-consuming. You can apply overarching styles to your entire report page for a consistent, branded look and feel.

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Setting a Report Theme

Themes are the fastest way to get a professional-looking report. A theme defines a set of colors, fonts, and visual properties that are automatically applied to your entire Power BI file.

• Go to the View tab in the main Power BI ribbon at the top of the window.
• In the Themes section, you'll see several built-in themes. Click the dropdown arrow to see them all.
• Simply click on a theme to apply it. You'll instantly see the colors and fonts change across all your report pages.

For true branding, you can customize a theme. This involves creating a special file (a JSON file) that specifies your company's exact color values, font families, and other defaults. Once you have this file, you can import it by selecting Browse for themes from the theme dropdown menu.

Customizing the Report Canvas

Sometimes you want to change the background of the entire report page.

• Make sure no visuals are selected on your canvas by clicking on the empty space.
• Open the Format pane (the paintbrush icon). It will now show formatting options for the report page.
• Expand the Canvas background section.
• From here, you can select a simple color for your background or click "Browse" to add an image. You can also adjust the transparency to have a subtle watermark effect.

Advanced Formatting Tips and Tricks

Once you've mastered the basics, these techniques can take your report to the next level.

Using Conditional Formatting Effectively

Conditional formatting allows you to automatically change a visual's format based on the data itself. It draws the viewer's eye to the most important information.

For a table or matrix visual:

• Select your table and go to the Format pane.
• Under the Visual tab, expand the Cell elements section.
• Choose the column you want to format from 'Select series' Dropdown list.
• Toggle on the feature you want. For example, toggle on Background color.
• Click the fx button to open the settings. Here you can define the rules. You could set it so that any value below 100 has a red background, and any value above 500 has a green one.

You can also apply these rules to bar chart colors, changing the color based on the value, which is great for highlighting top or bottom performers without any extra filtering.

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Adding Explanatory Text, Shapes, and Images

A great report often needs more than just charts. Use static elements to provide context, add branding, or organize your layout.

• Go to the Insert tab in the Power BI ribbon.
• Here you can insert a Text box to add titles or explanatory notes, Shapes like lines or rectangles to create dividers and sections on your report, and Images to add your company logo or relevant icons.
• Each of these elements can be formatted. Once added, just select the element and use its respective Format pane to change its fonts, colors, borders, and more.

Combining these elements helps you structure your report like a professional webpage or infographic, guiding the viewer through your data story deliberately.

Final Thoughts

Formatting in Power BI goes well beyond simply making things look pretty, it's a vital part of data storytelling that turns raw numbers into actionable business intelligence. By mastering the Format pane, using themes for consistency, and applying conditional formatting to highlight what's important, you can create reports that are not only professional but also incredibly effective at communicating insights clearly.

Ultimately, the goal is always to get from data to decision as quickly as possible. While being proficient in Power BI formatting is a valuable skill, setting up and constantly tweaking reports can become a major time sink. At Graphed, we handle the entire data connection and visualization process for you. Instead of navigating formatting panes, you simply describe the dashboard you need in plain English. We instantly build clean, professional, and real-time reports, allowing you to focus on analyzing insights rather than adjusting them.