How to Create a Summary Report in Power BI

Trying to show your latest business performance to stakeholders can feel like giving them a thousand-page book and asking them to find the plot. They don't need every single row of data, they need the headline, the main takeaways. This is where a summary report comes in. This guide will walk you through exactly how to build a clear and powerful summary report in Power BI, turning your raw data into a story that anyone can understand.

What Exactly Is a Summary Report?

Think of a summary report as the executive summary for your data. Instead of showing every individual transaction, customer ticket, or web session, it rolls everything up into high-level key performance indicators (KPIs) and trends. It answers big-picture questions at a glance:

What was our total revenue last quarter?
Which marketing channel brought in the most new leads?
What are our top-selling products by region?
How is our team’s sales performance trending month-over-month?

The goal isn’t to drown your audience in detail, but to give them a clear, accurate command center to see what’s going on. A good summary report should be easy to read in 60 seconds and provide a complete overview of the situation.

Before You Start: Getting Your Data Ready

Before you even open Power BI, a little prep work goes a long way. Building a report on messy, disconnected data is like trying to build a house on a shaky foundation. Here’s a quick checklist to run through:

1. Clean Your Source Data: Ensure your underlying data (in Excel, a database, etc.) is clean. This means no blank rows where there shouldn't be, consistent date formats, and no weird characters or errors. Power Query within Power BI can help with this, but starting with a clean source is always easier.

2. Check Your Data Model & Relationships: If you're pulling data from multiple tables (like a sales table, a products table, and a customer table), make sure they are correctly related in Power BI’s "Model" view. Proper relationships allow you to, for example, filter your total sales by a product category, even though that information lives in two separate tables.

3. Know Your Goal: What one question must this report answer? Start with a clear objective. Are you trying to show sales performance for Q3? Are you analyzing website traffic sources? Having a clear goal prevents you from adding unnecessary charts and noise that distract from the main point.

Building Your Summary Report in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Got your clean data and a clear goal? Great. Let's start building the report. We’ll use a common business scenario: creating a simple sales summary report.

Step 1: Get Your Data

First, you need to bring your data into Power BI Desktop.

On the Home ribbon, click Get Data.
Choose your data source. For this example, let's assume it's an Excel workbook.
Navigate to your file, select it, and click Open.
In the Navigator window, check the box next to the sheets or tables you want to import. A preview will appear on the right.
Click Load. If your data needs cleaning, you’d click Transform Data to open the Power Query Editor first, but we’ll assume it's ready to go.

Your data fields will now appear in the Data pane on the right side of the screen.

Step 2: Start with High-Level KPIs using Cards

Summary reports work best when the most important numbers are big, bold, and up front. The "Card" visual is perfect for this.

Total Revenue: In the Visualizations pane, click the Card icon (it looks like a rectangle with "123" on it). A blank card will appear on your report canvas. From your data fields, drag your primary metric, like ‘Sales Revenue,’ onto the Fields area of the visualization. Power BI will automatically sum it up.
Total Units Sold: Click on an empty part of the canvas, select the Card visual again, and drag your ‘Units Sold’ field into it.
Number of Customers: Repeat the process. This time, you might use a Customer ID field. Drag it to a new card visual. By default, Power BI might try to sum the IDs. Click the little dropdown arrow next to the field in the Visualizations pane and change the aggregation to Count (Distinct) to get a unique count of customers.

Arrange these cards at the top of your report. This gives anyone opening the dashboard an instant understanding of the three most important metrics.

Step 3: Tell a Story with Visualizations

Now that the headline numbers are in place, let's provide some context with a few well-chosen charts.

Sales by Product Category (Donut Chart)

A donut or pie chart is excellent for showing parts of a whole.

Click on the canvas and select the Donut chart icon.
Drag your Product Category field to the Legend section.
Drag your Sales Revenue field to the Values section.

Instantly, you have a visual breakdown showing which categories contribute the most to your total revenue.

Revenue Over Time (Line Chart)

A line chart is the best way to show a trend over time.

Select the Line chart icon from the Visualizations pane.
Drag your Order Date field to the X-axis. Power BI automatically creates a date hierarchy (Year, Quarter, Month, Day). You can use the drill-down arrows on the chart to move between them.
Drag your Sales Revenue field to the Y-axis.

Now you can see if your sales are growing, declining, or staying flat over time and spot seasonal trends.

Top 10 Products by Sales (Bar Chart)

Bar and column charts are fantastic for ranking and comparison.

Select the Stacked bar chart icon.
Drag your Product Name field to the Y-axis.
Drag your Sales Revenue to the X-axis.
To narrow it to the Top 10, open the Filters pane, click on the dropdown for Product Name, select Top N from the Filter type dropdown, type 10 into the Show items box, and then drag the Sales Revenue field into the By value box. Click Apply filter.

Step 4: Use DAX to Create Smart Measures

DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is Power BI's formula language. It may sound intimidating, but a few simple DAX measures can make your summary reports so much more powerful.

Instead of just dragging fields, you can create explicit measures. This gives you more control and makes your report run faster.

In the Home ribbon, click New Measure. A formula bar will appear. Here are a couple of essential examples:

Total Sales Measure: Even though dropping the field works, creating a measure is better practice.

Total Sales = SUM('Sales'[Sales Revenue])

Average Sale Value: Get more granular with your KPIs.

Average Order Value = AVERAGE('Sales'[Sales Revenue])

Once you create these measures, they’ll appear in your Data pane (with a little calculator icon). You can now use these measures in your visuals instead of the raw fields, giving you a more robust and scalable report.

Step 5: Add Slicers for Interactivity

A static summary is good, but an interactive one is great. Slicers are filters that live directly on your report canvas, allowing users to slice and dice the data themselves without needing to be Power BI wizards.

Click the Slicer icon in the Visualizations pane.
Drag a field you want to filter by — for example, Region or Store Location — into the Field well.
By default, it will show a list. You can change this to a dropdown in the visual formatting options to save space.
Add another slicer for the date by dragging your Order Date field into a new slicer visual. This will often default to a responsive slider.

Now, users can click a region or select a date range, and all the visuals on your report will dynamically update to reflect their selection. This turns your report from a static image into a dynamic dashboard for exploration.

Best Practices for an Effective Summary Report

Knowing how to build the report is half the battle. Making it effective is the other half.

Keep It Simple: The temptation is to fill every pixel with a chart. Don't. A good summary report should have no more than 5-7 key visuals. Too much information is no information.
Organize Intuitively: Place your most important KPIs (your cards) in the top-left, as that's where most people look first. Group related charts together to create a logical flow.
Use Clear Titles: Don't leave your charts with default titles like "Sum of Sales by Category." Change it to something readable, like "Sales Revenue by Product Category."
Mind Your Colors: Use color to highlight information, not just to decorate. Stick to a simple, clean color palette. Using the same color for the same metric across different charts helps with readability.

Final Thoughts

Creating a summary report in Power BI is about turning complexity into clarity. By focusing on high-level KPIs, choosing the right visuals to tell a story, and adding interactive slicers, you can build a powerful dashboard that gives your team the insights they need to make smarter decisions, without burying them in rows of data.

While Power BI is an incredibly powerful tool, mastering it takes time — time spent learning DAX, wrangling data sources, and clicking through configuration menus. We experienced this friction firsthand, spending hours on reports that should have taken minutes. That's why we created Graphed . It lets you connect all your data sources in a few clicks and build real-time, interactive dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English. No more wrestling with DAX or manually refreshing spreadsheets, you get the answers you need in seconds, not hours.