How to Duplicate Visual in Power BI

Building a Power BI report often means creating a series of similar charts that analyze different slices of your data. Instead of building each one from scratch, duplicating a visual you've already perfected is a huge time-saver. This guide will walk you through the various ways to duplicate visuals in Power BI, from simple copy-and-paste to more advanced workflow tips that ensure consistency across your reports.

Why Bother Duplicating Visuals in Power BI?

Before we get into the "how," it's worth understanding the "why." Duplicating visuals isn't just about laziness, it's about working smarter. Here are the core benefits:

• Maintaining Consistency: When you duplicate a visual, you're not just copying the data fields, you're copying every formatting choice you've made. This includes colors, font sizes, title alignment, axis labels, borders, and shadows. This ensures your report has a polished, professional, and consistent look and feel without having to manually set the formatting every single time.
• Boosting Efficiency: Creating a visual and styling it perfectly takes time. Recreating that work for ten different charts is a surefire way to lose an afternoon. Duplicating lets you do the hard formatting work once and then apply it instantly as you build out your report, drastically speeding up your development process.
• Enabling Easy Comparisons: A common-sense use case is creating side-by-side comparisons. For example, you might want to show 'Revenue by Region' right next to 'Profit by Region.' By duplicating the first chart, you can simply swap out the 'Revenue' data field for 'Profit' and be confident that both charts are otherwise identical, making for a clear, apples-to-apples comparison.
• Reducing Errors: When you manually recreate visuals, it's easy to make small, unintentional mistakes. You might forget a specific filter, choose a slightly different shade of blue, or mistype a title. Duplication removes these variables, leading to more accurate and reliable reports.

The Bread and Butter: 3 Easy Ways to Duplicate a Visual

Let's start with the fundamental methods you'll use most often. These techniques work for duplicating a visual on the same report page.

1. The Classic Copy and Paste (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V)

This is the most intuitive method and is identical to how you copy and paste in most other applications. It's fast, familiar, and effective.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Click on the visual you want to duplicate. You'll see a bounding box appear around it, confirming it's selected.
2. Press Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy it. Alternatively, you can right-click the visual and select Copy > Copy visual.
3. Click on any empty space on your report canvas where you want the new visual to appear.
4. Press Ctrl+V on your keyboard to paste. Power BI will create an exact copy of the selected visual, typically slightly offset from the original.
5. Drag the new visual to your desired location on the page.

This is the go-to method for quick, on-the-fly duplication within a single report page.

2. Using the 'Duplicate' Command

Power BI also includes a built-in "Duplicate" function, which achieves the same result as copy-paste in one click. Some users find this more direct.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Select the visual you want to copy.
2. Hover over the visual to make its header visible. Click the "..." (More options) icon.
3. From the dropdown menu, select Duplicate.

A perfect copy will immediately appear on the page, ready to be repositioned and modified.

3. Copying a Visual to a Different Page

Very often, you want to maintain certain elements like logos, KPI cards, or navigation buttons across all pages of your report. Trying to rebuild them perfectly on each page is a chore you can easily avoid.

The process is nearly identical to the standard copy-and-paste method, just with an extra step.

1. On your source page, click on the visual you want to copy across pages.
2. Press Ctrl+C to copy it.
3. In the bottom navigation, click on the tab for the destination page you want to move the visual to.
4. Once on the new page, press Ctrl+V to paste the visual.

The visual will appear on the new page with its formatting intact. One thing to watch for: the data in your pasted visual may change if the new page has different report-level or page-level filters applied.

Beyond the Basics: Smarter Duplication Strategies

While copy-and-paste will get you far, there are more strategic ways to use duplication to enforce consistency and speed up your workflow even more.

Applying Consistent Formatting with the Format Painter

Sometimes you don't need to duplicate an entire visual, but you want a new visual to have the exact same style as an existing one. Manually going through dozens of formatting options is tedious. This is where the Format Painter is a lifesaver.

Imagine you have a perfectly formatted bar chart and you just created a new pie chart that has Power BI's default blue formatting. Here’s how to make them match:

1. Click on the source visual (the one with the formatting you love).
2. Navigate to the Home ribbon at the top of the Power BI window.
3. Click the Format Painter icon (it looks like a paintbrush). Your cursor will change to include a paintbrush icon.
4. Now, click on the target visual (the new pie chart) that you want to apply the formatting to.

Instantly, the styling—including colors, font settings, backgrounds, and more—will be copied over. Pro-Tip: If you want to apply the same format to multiple visuals at once, double-click the Format Painter icon. This will "lock" the formatting on your cursor, allowing you to click on several visuals one after another to apply the same style. Press the Esc key to exit this mode.

Creating a 'Template' Visual to Streamline Your Workflow

For larger reports, you can take a more structured approach by creating pre-formatted "template" visuals. This is a powerful technique for a highly efficient workflow.

How It Works:

1. Create a hidden page in your report. You can name it something like "_Templates" (the underscore pushes it to the end of your tab list) and then right-click the page tab and select Hide Page.
2. On this hidden page, build a single, perfect version of each visual type you use frequently—one bar chart, one line chart, one KPI card, one table, etc.
3. Style each of these templates exactly how you want your final report to look. Set the title fonts, axis labels, data colors, toggle borders, add shadows—get it perfect.
4. Now, whenever you need to build a new visual in your main report, simply go to your hidden template page, copy the corresponding template (Ctrl+C), and paste it (Ctrl+V) onto your active report page.

All you have to do now is drag your new data fields into it. This guarantees 100% consistency and cuts down your styling time to almost zero.

What to Do After You Have Duplicated a Visual

Duplicating is the first step. The next step is to modify the copy to show what you need. Here are the most common modifications you'll make:

Changing Data Fields

This is the most common reason for copying a visual. With your new visual selected, look at the Visualizations pane. To change the data, simply drag a new field from the Data pane and drop it into the appropriate well (e.g., Y-axis, X-axis, Legend, Values). You can drop it directly on top of an existing field to replace it.

Example: You duplicated your 'Sales by Country' chart. To turn it into 'Profit by Country', just drag the 'Profit' field and drop it onto the 'Sales' field in the 'Values' well.

Adjusting Visual-Level Filters

Maybe you want your duplicated chart to show data for a specific year or product category. With the new visual selected, go to the Filters pane. Here, you can add or modify filters that apply only to this selected visual without affecting the original.

Switching The Visual Type

Sometimes you duplicate a visual for its data and filters but realize it would be better as a different chart type.

With your duplicated visual still selected, just click a different icon in the Visualizations pane (e.g., changing a Table to a Clustered column chart). Power BI will do its best to intelligently convert the visual while keeping your data fields in place.

Final Thoughts

Mastering how to duplicate visuals in Power BI is a fundamental skill that moves you from a beginner to an efficient report builder. Whether you're using a simple copy-paste, applying styles with the Format Painter, or creating a hidden template page, these methods are all focused on saving you time and ensuring your reports are professional and consistent.

While these tips will certainly speed up your manual report-building in Power BI, we realize that the process of clicking, dragging, and formatting visuals is still a huge time sink. At Graphed, we decided to automate this entire workflow. Instead of copying, pasting, and reconfiguring charts one by one, you can just ask a question in plain English like, "create a dashboard showing total ad spend vs. revenue by campaign," and our AI builds the interactive visuals for you instantly, using real-time data from your connected sources. This allows you to skip the manual busywork and get right to the insights.