How to Create Cards in Power BI

Displaying your most important metrics in a big, bold format is one of the fastest ways to make a report useful. Power BI "Card" visualizations do precisely this, letting you showcase key performance indicators (KPIs) like total sales, user count, or website sessions so they can't be missed. This article walks you through exactly how to create, format, and enhance these essential dashboard elements.

Graphed

Your AI Data Analyst to Create Live Dashboards

Connect your data sources and let AI build beautiful, real-time dashboards for you in seconds.

Build Your First Dashboard

What is a Power BI Card?

In Power BI, a Card is a visualization type specifically designed to display a single, aggregated value in a clear and prominent way. Think of it as the headline number for a section of your report. Instead of showing trends across time or comparisons between categories like a line chart or bar chart, a Card's job is to put one critical number front and center.

Instead of showing trends across time or comparisons between categories like a line chart or bar chart, a Card's job is to put one critical number front and center.

For example, you could use a Card to show:

• Total Revenue for the current quarter.
• Number of New Customers This Month.
• Total Website Traffic Last Week.
• Average Order Value (AOV).

Its simplicity is its greatest strength. When you need a stakeholder to answer "How are we doing?" in a split second, a well-placed Card delivers the answer loud and clear.

Why Use Cards in Your Dashboard?

While dashboards are composed of many different visuals, Cards play a specific and vital role. They serve as the anchor points that immediately draw a user's attention to the most important metrics.

• At-a-Glance Insights: Cards provide the highest-level summary of your data. Before diving into the details of charts and tables, users can get a quick health check of the business by scanning the main Cards at the top of a report.
• Highlighting KPIs: They are the perfect visual for representing your key performance indicators. Every business, department, and project has a few numbers that matter most, and Cards ensure those numbers are the first thing people see.
• Setting Context: When used alongside other visuals, dynamic Cards can update to reflect filtered data, providing immediate context. For instance, if you click on "Q3" in a slicer, your "Total Sales" Card instantly updates to show only Q3 sales.
• Space Efficiency: For a single data point, a Card is much more direct and space-efficient than using a whole chart. This allows you to build cleaner, more scannable reports.

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your First Power BI Card

Ready to create your own? Let's walk through the process using a common example: displaying total sales from a sample dataset. We assume you have Power BI Desktop installed and some data loaded.

AI for Data Analysis

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF Guide

AI for Data Analysis Crash Course

Learn how to get AI to do data analysis for you — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to go from raw data to insights without writing a single line of code.

Download Free Guide

Step 1: Open Power BI and Load Your Data

First, make sure you have your data loaded into your Power BI file. For this example, imagine we have a simple table named 'Sales' that contains columns like 'OrderDate', 'ProductCategory', and 'Revenue'.

Step 2: Select the Card Visual from the Visualizations Pane

With your report canvas open, look to the right-hand panel called Visualizations. You'll see an array of icons representing different charts and graphs. Find the icon that looks like a number on a card (it will be labeled 'Card') and click it. An empty Card visual will appear on your canvas.

Step 3: Add Your Data Field

Next, look at the Data pane, which lists all your available tables and data fields. To show total sales, find your 'Sales' table and drag the 'Revenue' field into the "Fields" box of the selected Card visual.

Instantly, the Card on your canvas will update to show a single number. Power BI automatically performs an aggregation - in this case, it sums up all the values in the 'Revenue' column.

Step 4: Understand and Adjust Aggregations

By default, Power BI often sums numeric fields. However, you can change this. In the "Fields" well where you dropped your 'Revenue' field, click the small dropdown arrow next to the field name. A menu will appear with different aggregation options:

• Sum: Adds all the numbers together (e.g., total revenue).
• Average: Calculates the average value (e.g., average sale price).
• Count (Distinct): Counts the number of unique entries (e.g., how many unique customers made a purchase).
• Count: Counts the total number of entries (e.g., total number of transactions).
• Minimum: Shows the smallest value.
• Maximum: Shows the largest value.

Choose the aggregation that represents the metric you want to display. For showcasing total revenue, 'Sum' is the right choice.

Customizing and Formatting Your Power BI Card

A basic Card gets the job done, but with a little formatting, you can make it much more informative and visually appealing.

Select the Card you want to format, and then click the Format your visual icon (the paintbrush) in the Visualizations pane. This opens up a new set of options.

Graphed

Your AI Data Analyst to Create Live Dashboards

Connect your data sources and let AI build beautiful, real-time dashboards for you in seconds.

Build Your First Dashboard

Formatting the Callout Value

The "callout value" is the main number displayed in the Card. Under the Visual tab in the formatting options, click on Callout value.

Here you can control:

• Font: Change the font family, font size, color, and style (bold, italic). Making the font a bit larger and bolder can help it stand out.
• Display units: Instead of showing $2,456,123.50, you can have Power BI automatically display it as $2.5M. You can choose from Auto, Thousands (K), Millions (M), Billions (B), and Trillions (T). This makes large numbers much easier to read.
• Value decimal places: Adjust the precision of the number shown.

Working with the Category Label

The "category label" is the small text that appears underneath the callout value, telling you what the number represents (in our case, "Sum of Revenue").

Expand the Category label section in the formatting pane to adjust it. You can change its font and color. A common design choice is to turn this label off entirely (by toggling the switch) and use a separate title for the visual instead, which gives you more control over the text.

Adding a Title and Background

To give your Card context, it's best to add a descriptive title.

1. Switch from the Visual tab to the General tab in the format pane.
2. Expand the Title dropdown.
3. Toggle the switch to 'On'.
4. Type your title in the "Text" box, such as "Total Revenue | YTD". Here, you can also adjust the title's font, color, and alignment.
5. In the Effects section on the same tab, you can change the background color or add a subtle shadow or visual border to help the Card pop off the page.

Advanced Card Techniques

Once you've mastered the basic Card, you can explore more advanced options to display even more insights.

Creating a Multi-Row Card

What if you want to display several related summary numbers together, like Total Sales, Total Profit, and Average Order Value? A Multi-Row Card is perfect for this. It's a separate visual type found right next to the standard Card in the Visualizations pane.

To use it, select the Multi-Row Card visual and drag multiple data fields into the "Fields" well. For example, you could add:

• Sum of Revenue
• Average of Order Size
• Distinct Count of Customer ID

This will create a compact list of your top-level metrics in a single visual element, which is great for building a summary section of your dashboard.

AI for Data Analysis

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF Guide

AI for Data Analysis Crash Course

Learn how to get AI to do data analysis for you — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to go from raw data to insights without writing a single line of code.

Download Free Guide

Using DAX to Create Dynamic Measures

The real power of Power BI comes alive when you use Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) to create your own custom calculations. These can be used in Cards to display highly specific and dynamic information.

For example, instead of just showing the sum of all revenue, you might want to show revenue only for the current year. You could create a new measure with the following DAX formula:

Current Year Sales = 
CALCULATE(
    SUM(Sales[Revenue]),
    YEAR(Sales[OrderDate]) = YEAR(TODAY())
)

To create this, right-click on your table in the Data pane, select "New measure," and paste in the formula. After creating this measure, you can drag 'Current Year Sales' into your Card. Now, the Card will always show sales for only the current year, regardless of any other filters on the report page. This is incredibly powerful for creating metrics that remain constant and provide a consistent frame of reference.

Final Thoughts

Power BI Cards are a simple yet powerful tool for making your reports more digestible and impactful. By bringing your most critical KPIs to the forefront with clear callout values and strategic formatting, you turn a dense dashboard into a clear story about your business performance. Take the time to master this fundamental visual - it's one you'll use in nearly every report you build.

Creating these visuals in Power BI is a hands-on process, especially when you start incorporating DAX and managing multiple data sources from tools like Salesforce, Google Analytics, or Shopify. We built Graphed because we wanted to eliminate the steep learning curve and constant manual work. Instead of clicking through menus to format layouts or writing formulas, you can simply ask in plain English - "show me total revenue from Shopify and sessions from Google Analytics last month on a dashboard" - and an interactive, real-time report is built for you in seconds. It allows your entire team to get answers without having to become BI experts.