How to Create a Flow Chart in Power BI

Building a flow chart in Power BI might seem tricky at first, since it's not a native feature like a bar or line chart. However, by using the right custom visuals, you can create dynamic and interactive flow diagrams that bring your processes to life. This article will walk you through how to prepare your data and build a compelling, data-driven flow chart directly within your Power BI report.

Why Build a Flow Chart in Power BI?

You might be wondering why you wouldn’t just use a tool like Visio or PowerPoint and paste an image into your report. While that’s an option for static diagrams, creating a flow chart inside Power BI offers several unique advantages:

• Data-Driven Nodes: Each step in your flow chart can be linked to actual data. You can visualize the volume of traffic, number of deals, or revenue passing through each stage of a process.
• Interactive Analysis: Clicking on a node in your flow chart can filter other visuals on the report page. For example, clicking the "Qualified Lead" stage in a sales process could filter a table to show only the reps who worked on those leads.
• Automated Updates: When your underlying data source refreshes, your flow chart updates automatically. No more manually updating diagrams and re-uploading static images every week.
• Centralized Reporting: Everything stays within one unified report. Stakeholders don’t have to switch between a dashboard and a separate document to understand a process, the story is all in one place.

Flow charts in Power BI are perfect for visualizing customer journeys, analyzing funnel drop-offs, mapping out supply chain steps, or detailing an internal sales pipeline.

Understanding the Basics: Your Data Structure is Everything

Power BI isn't a drawing tool. To create a flow visual, you need to provide data in a specific format it can understand. For most flow and path analysis visuals, your dataset must define the relationships between nodes. That means at a bare minimum, you'll need three key columns:

• Source: The starting point or previous step in the process.
• Destination: The next step in the process.
• Weight (or Value): A numerical value that determines the "thickness" or magnitude of the flow between the source and destination. This could be user count, revenue, number of support tickets, etc.

Imagine you want to visualize a simple user journey on your website starting from the home page. Your data might look something like this:

Each row in this table defines a unique path between two points and the number of users who followed that path. This structure is precisely what Power BI visuals need to draw the connections and size them appropriately.

Method 1: Using a Sankey Chart as a Flow Chart

The Sankey chart is one of the most popular and effective custom visuals for creating flow charts in Power BI. It’s excellent at showing how a value is distributed from a source to multiple destinations. Let's build one step-by-step.

Step 1: Get the Sankey Chart Visual

The Sankey chart isn't included by default, so you need to get it from the AppSource marketplace.

1. On the Visualizations pane in Power BI Desktop, click the three dots (...) at the bottom.
2. Select Get more visuals.
3. In the AppSource pop-up, search for "Sankey".
4. You'll see a few options. A popular one is simply called "Sankey". Click Add to install it in your Power BI environment. A small icon for the visual will now appear in your Visualizations pane.

Step 2: Add the Visual to Your Report and Map the Data

Now that you have the visual available, you can add it to your report canvas.

1. Click the Sankey chart icon in the Visualizations pane to add an empty visual block to your page.
2. Select the new visual. On the Visualizations pane, you will now see fields for Source, Destination, and Weight (or similar terms depending on the specific visual you installed).
3. Assuming you have the example data structure from above, drag and drop your data columns into the correct fields:

Instantly, the visual will render the flow diagram. You will see nodes for "Home Page", "Features Page", etc., and connecting paths between them, with the thickness of each path representing the user count.

Step 3: Customize and Refine Your Flow Chart

The default visual is functional, but you'll likely want to adjust it for clarity and aesthetics.

• Colors: Under the Format visual tab (the paintbrush icon), look for a "Links" or "Data colors" section. You can customize the color of each link or have them inherit colors from the source or destination nodes. This is great for highlighting specific paths.
• Labels: Toggle on data labels to show the exact values on each flow path. This saves users from having to hover over everything to understand the numbers. You can also adjust font size and color for better legibility.
• Node Position: Some advanced flow visuals allow for manual dragging and dropping of nodes to rearrange the chart for a cleaner look.
• Scaling: Look for settings that control how the scale works. Sometimes, a logarithmic scale can make a big difference if you have a huge range of values (e.g., one path with 1 million users and another with 100).

Method 2: Using the Visio Visual for Detailed Diagrams

If your goal is to map data to a predefined, complex diagram (like an office layout, a network map, or a detailed process with specific flowchart shapes), the official Microsoft Visio visual is the better choice.

The process is slightly different because you build the visual layout in Visio first and then link it to your data in Power BI.

Step 1: Prepare Your Visio Diagram and Your Data

In your Visio diagram, each shape you want to link to data must have a unique identifier. This is often the shape's text or a custom data property.

In Power BI, your data table needs a column that contains an exact match for those unique identifiers. For example, if you have a shape in Visio labeled "Lead Gen Campaign," your data must have a column with a row containing the value "Lead Gen Campaign".

Step 2: Add the Visio Visual and Connect Your Diagram

1. Just like with the Sankey, get the "Visio Visual" from AppSource.
2. Add it to your report canvas.
3. The visual will prompt you to link a Visio file. You will need to upload your diagram to SharePoint or OneDrive for Business to get a sharable link and paste it here.
4. Once your diagram loads, you'll see a field in the Visualizations pane called ID.
5. Drag the column from your data table that contains the unique identifiers into the ID field.

Step 3: Map Values to the Shapes

Once the IDs are matched, you can drag other data measures (like Sales Amount, Completion Rate, etc.) into the Values field. Now you can use Power BI to automatically color-code the shapes in your Visio diagram. For example, you can set a conditional formatting rule to color a process step red if its completion rate falls below 80%.

This method is less about visualizing flow and more about enriching a pre-existing diagram with live data insights.

Best Practices for Effective Flow Charts

• Keep it Clean: Overly complex flow charts with dozens of crossing lines are confusing. Limit the number of nodes or aggregate minor paths into an "Other" category to improve readability.
• Tell a Story: Your flow chart should answer a specific question. Is it showing where users drop off most? What is the most profitable customer journey? Design the chart and your report to guide the viewer to that key insight.
• Use Color Meaningfully: Don't just make it colorful. Use color to draw attention. For example, you can use a diverging color scale to show positive and negative performance or use a single bright color to highlight the most important pathway.
• Combine with Other Visuals: The real power comes from interaction. Place your flow chart on a report page with a bar chart of top traffic sources and a table with detailed campaign data. Clicking a path in your Sankey chart should filter those other visuals, enabling deep-dive analysis.

Final Thoughts

While Power BI doesn't have a one-click "flow chart" button, creating one is a powerful way to add a new dimension to your reports. By preparing your data correctly and leveraging custom visuals from AppSource like the Sankey Chart or the Visio Visual, you can transform static process lists into dynamic, interactive analytical tools.

This entire process shows just how much effort can go into learning a specific tool's nuances and preparing your data just right. For many in marketing, sales, and operations teams, the goal isn't to become a Power BI expert, but to get quick answers from their business data. That's why we built Graphed. Instead of wrestling with custom visuals and data models, you just connect your sources and ask in plain English something like, "Show me a flow of how users move from our homepage to signing up for a trial," and get a live, automated dashboard back in seconds - no setup required.