How to Change Language on Power BI

Working with an international team or creating reports for a global audience often means you’ll need to switch languages in Power BI. You can change everything from the interface menus to the data model itself to better suit your own workflow or the needs of your audience. This guide will walk you through exactly how to change the language settings in both Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service.

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Why Change the Language in Power BI?

There are a few practical reasons you might want to switch languages. You could be building a dashboard for a client in another country, collaborating with teammates who speak a different language, or simply prefer to work in your native tongue. Power BI is designed for this flexibility, but its language settings can be a little confusing because they operate on different levels.

Understanding these levels is the key to getting the result you want:

• Application Language: This is the language of the menus, buttons, and panes within the Power BI software itself. Changing this helps you navigate the user interface (UI) more comfortably.
• Model Language: This is the language that affects how your data is interpreted, including cultural contexts for dates and numbers. It also sets the language for the metadata of your report, like the names of tables and columns that viewers will see.
• Power BI Service Language: This setting controls the language of the browser-based Power BI interface (app.powerbi.com) and is usually determined by your browser’s settings.

Let's go through the steps for adjusting each of these.

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How to Change the Interface Language in Power BI Desktop

Changing the language of the software's interface is the most common task users need to perform. If all you want is to see the "File," "Home," and "View" tabs in a different language, this is the setting you need to adjust. It only affects your experience as the report creator in the Desktop application.

Follow these steps:

1. Open Power BI Desktop.
2. In the top-left corner, click on File > Options and settings > Options. This will open the main Options window where most global configurations are located.
3. In the new window, look at the menu on the left under the Global section and click on Regional Settings.
4. Here you will see a dropdown menu for Application Language. It is likely set to "Match Windows language" by default. Click this dropdown and select your desired language from the list. Let's say you want to switch to Spanish.
5. Click OK to confirm your selection.
6. Now for the most important step: a dialog box will appear telling you that you need to restart Power BI Desktop for the changes to take effect. Save any work you have open, close the application, and then reopen it.

When you relaunch Power BI, the entire interface - from the welcome screen to all the toolbars and panes - will now be displayed in the language you selected. Your column names, tables, and any text you physically added to the report will remain unchanged.

How to Change the Model & Data Language in Power BI Desktop

What if you want to create a report that will appear in a different language for your end-users? This requires changing the model language. This setting determines the language of the report’s metadata and influences how Power BI interprets locale-specific data, like date formats (e.g., DD/MM/YYYY vs. MM/DD/YYYY).

This setting is a bit different because it's specific to the file you're currently working on, not a global setting for the application.

For New Reports

When creating a new report for a specific locale, you should set the model language from the start.

1. In Power BI Desktop, go to File > Options and settings > Options.
2. Under the Current File section on the left, click on Regional Settings.
3. You'll see a dropdown for Model language. Select the language you want your viewers to see. For example, if you're building a report for a team in Germany, you would select Deutsch (German).
4. Click OK.

This setting won’t translate existing column names. Instead, it sets the foundation for creating a multi-language report. When a user whose language is set to German in the Power BI Service views your report, Power BI will know to show them the German version of date hierarchies and other metadata, provided you have added translations.

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Advanced Tip: Creating a True Multi-Language Report

Simply setting the model language doesn't automatically translate your custom column names, measures, or titles. To do that, you need to provide the translations for each language you want to support. While very powerful, this is an advanced feature that requires an external tool.

The standard way to accomplish this is by using the open-source Tabular Editor. Here's a quick overview of the process:

1. Build your report in your base language within Power BI Desktop.
2. Open Tabular Editor and connect it to your Power BI Desktop instance.
3. In Tabular Editor, you can select tables, columns, and measures and add translations for their captions in different languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Japanese).
4. Save these changes back to your data model.

When you publish this report to the Power BI Service, viewers will automatically see the report objects in their default language, creating a seamless experience for global teams.

How to Change the Display Language in Power BI Service

Once you publish your reports online, the language is handled by the Power BI Service. Each user can adjust the language settings for their own account independent of the reports themselves. Most of the time, the service automatically detects the language from the user's web browser settings.

If you need to manually override this, here’s how:

1. Log in to your Power BI account at app.powerbi.com.
2. In the upper-right corner of the screen, click the gear icon (⚙️) to open the Settings menu.
3. Select Settings from the dropdown menu.
4. In the General tab, click on Language.
5. By default, it’s set to "Default (browser language)." You can open the dropdown menu here and choose a specific language. This will force the Power BI Service interface to always appear in that language, regardless of your browser settings.
6. A "Refresh now" button will appear. Click it to apply the language change immediately.

Remember, this only changes the Power BI Service UI for that user. It doesn't alter the language of the report content you created. A user with their settings in French will see "Workspaces" and "My data" in French, but the report titles and column charts will still appear in the language they were created in (unless you set up multi-language translations as described earlier).

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Troubleshooting Common Language Issues

Even with a clear process, you might hit a snag. Here are a couple of common problems and their solutions.

• "I changed the language in Power BI Desktop, but nothing happened." Remember to restart Power BI Desktop. The application language requires a full restart to apply the new settings.
• "Only the menus changed languages, but my chart labels and data are still in English." This is by design. Changing the "Application Language" only affects the interface. To show report elements in another language, you must set the "Model Language" and provide metadata translations using a tool like Tabular Editor.
• "Dates and numbers aren't formatted correctly for my region." This is usually controlled by the "Regional Settings for this file" in Power BI Desktop options. Ensure you have the correct locale selected under Current File > Regional Settings > Locale for import. This tells Power Query how to interpret data types from your source that vary by region.

Final Thoughts

Power BI offers robust, layered controls for managing languages, giving you the flexibility to adapt your work for a global audience with different needs. You can change the Desktop application's UI for your personal comfort, set a model language for a specific report's audience, and allow end-users to view the Power BI Service in their preferred language.

Mastering these details involves navigating menus and sometimes external tools, which is typical for powerful BI software but can be time-consuming. We built Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require you to become an expert on complex software settings. Rather than digging through menus to configure every detail, you can use simple, natural language to instantly build real-time dashboards that pull data from all your marketing and sales platforms. There's no steep learning curve - just connect your data, describe what you need, and let AI handle the setup.