How to Create a Roadmap in Power BI

A static roadmap in PowerPoint or Excel becomes outdated the moment it's saved. Building your project or marketing roadmap in Power BI, however, turns it into a living, interactive dashboard that updates automatically. This article walks you through how to create a dynamic roadmap in Power BI using built-in visuals and offers tips to make it even more insightful for your team.

Why Build Your Roadmap in Power BI?

While a simple image of a timeline works for a high-level presentation, a Power BI roadmap gives you tangible advantages for managing projects, tracking campaign progress, and communicating with stakeholders. The benefits are clear:

• It's Dynamic: When your underlying data (from a spreadsheet, database, or project management tool) updates, your roadmap reflects those changes automatically after a refresh. No more manually moving bars and shapes around in slides.
• It's Interactive: Stakeholders can filter the roadmap by team member, project phase, or status. They can hover over tasks to see more details, making meetings and reviews much more productive.
• It's Integrated: Your roadmap doesn’t live in a silo. You can place it on a dashboard right next to key performance indicators (KPIs) like budget spent, leads generated, or revenue booked. This gives you a complete picture of performance in context.
• It's Sharable: You can publish your Power BI report and share a secure link, embed it in a SharePoint site, or send it as a PDF. Everyone on your team sees the same, up-to-date version of the plan.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

Every effective Power BI visual starts with clean, well-structured data. For a roadmap or Gantt chart, you need a simple table that contains the essential details for each task or initiative. You can create this in Excel, Google Sheets, SharePoint lists, or any database you prefer.

At a minimum, your data source should include these columns:

• A Task Name to identify each item (e.g., "Launch Q3 Social Campaign," "Update Website Homepage," "Publish Customer Case Study").
• A Start Date for when the task begins.
• An End Date for when the task is scheduled to be completed.

To make your roadmap even more powerful, consider adding these optional columns:

• Category or Phase: Group tasks by larger strategic initiatives (e.g., "Awareness," "Consideration," "Conversion," or "Phase 1," "Phase 2").
• Assigned To: The person or team responsible for the task.
• Status: The current state of the task (e.g., "Not Started," "In Progress," "Completed," "On Hold").
• Completion %: A numerical value from 0 to 1 (or 0 to 100) representing how much of the task is done.

Example Data Structure:

Here’s what your data might look like in a simple Excel table:

Once you have this table, import it into Power BI by clicking "Get Data" and selecting your source (e.g., Excel workbook, Google Sheet).

Step 2: Building the Roadmap with the Gantt Chart Visual

The easiest and most effective way to build a roadmap in Power BI is by using the Gantt chart visual, which is now a standard, certified option.

Finding and Adding the Gantt Chart

You can find the Gantt chart visual directly in the Visualizations pane in Power BI Desktop. If you don't see it, you may need to add it from AppSource:

1. In the Visualizations pane, click the three dots ("...").
2. Select Get more visuals.
3. Search for "Gantt" and find the visual named "Gantt" by Microsoft. Click Add.

Now, click the Gantt chart icon to add it to your report canvas.

Configuring the Visual Fields

With the new blank visual selected, drag your data columns from the Fields pane to the corresponding areas in the Visualizations pane:

• Task: Drag your Task Name column here. This will list all your initiatives on the left side of the chart.
• Start Date: Drag your Start Date column here.
• End Date: Drag your End Date column here.
• Progress: Drag your Completion % column. This controls the shading inside the bars to show how far along a task is. Make sure Power BI is not summarizing this (right-click and select "Don't summarize" if needed).
• Resource: Drag your Assigned To column to show who is responsible for each task next to the bar.

Instantly, you should see a Gantt chart forming on your screen. The bars represent the duration of your tasks plotted across a timeline.

Formatting and Customizing Your Roadmap

The raw chart is useful, but a little formatting goes a long way. Click the visual, then go to the Format pane (the paintbrush icon) to fine-tune its appearance.

Task Labels

Go to the Task Labels section and toggle off or on "Data labels." Task labels are extremely useful to highlight key dates and people associated with each task. Showing them with the "Resource" and task name can make the chart look cluttered.

Bar Colors and Legend

To color-code your roadmap, use the Legend field. Drag the Category or Status column from your Data pane into the Legend in the Visualizations pane. This will automatically assign different colors to each category.

Navigate to Bars > Colors in the format options to change the default colors for each category. For example, set all "Content Marketing" tasks to blue and "Paid Media" tasks to green.

Timeline and Granularity

Under the Date Type format section, you can adjust the timeline's display. Change the granularity from months to weeks or even days for a more detailed view of short-term projects. You can also customize date formatting and colors to match your branding.

Milestones

To add milestones (key events like "Campaign Launch" or "Project Deadline"), add a row in your data source where the Start Date and End Date are the same. In the Gantt chart's format options, go to Milestones and change the shape (e.g., from a circle to a diamond) and color to make them stand out.

Step 3: Making Your Roadmap Interactive with Slicers

The real magic of Power BI is its interactivity. You can add slicers that allow you and your team to filter the roadmap to see exactly what you need.

From the Visualizations pane, click the Slicer icon. Drag it onto your report canvas. With the new slicer selected, drag a column from your Data pane to the Field well.

Here are a few highly useful slicers:

• Filter by Phase/Category: Drag your Category column into a slicer. Now users can select "Paid Media Campaign" to see only the tasks related to that initiative.
• Filter by Team Member: Create a slicer with the Assigned To column to focus on a specific person's workload.
• Filter by Status: Add a Status slicer to see tasks that are "In Progress" or "On Hold."

Bonus: Level Up with Custom DAX Measures

Create new measures using DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) for more advanced insights. Right-click your table in the Fields pane and select New measure.

Highlight Overdue Tasks

A common request is to see which tasks are falling behind schedule. Create this measure:

Task Overdue Flag = IF(MAX('Tasks'[Status]) <> "Completed" && MAX('Tasks'[End Date]) < TODAY(), 1, 0)

Then, select your Gantt chart, go to Format > Bars > Colors, click the fx button (Conditional formatting), and set rules based on Task Overdue Flag. Tasks with overdue status will turn red.

Calculate Time-Based KPIs

Use DAX measures such as:

Days Until Deadline = DATEDIFF(TODAY(), MAX(Tasks[End Date]), DAY)

or

Total In-Progress Tasks = COUNTROWS(FILTER('Tasks', 'Tasks'[Status] = "In Progress"))

These visuals can help you monitor progress at a glance.

Final Thoughts

Moving your roadmap from a static document to a Power BI dashboard adds incredible value by creating a dynamic, interactive, and centralized source of truth for your projects. By preparing your data correctly and leveraging the built-in Gantt chart visual combined with slicers, you can build a professional roadmap that keeps your team aligned and informed without constant manual updates.

As you get more comfortable, automate even more of the reporting process. Tools like Graphed make this easier by connecting your sources and creating dashboards with simple conversational commands. Instead of clicking and dragging, just ask, "Create a roadmap showing ad campaign tasks grouped by status for this quarter," and the tool handles the rest. Focus on insights, not setup.