How to Make Power BI Reports Look Good

A Power BI report packed with accurate data can still fall flat if it looks like a cluttered mess. Good design isn't just about making things pretty, it's about making information clear, intuitive, and easy to act on. This guide will walk you through practical, actionable steps to transform your Power BI reports from confusing data dumps into clean, professional-looking dashboards that your team will actually want to use.

Good Design is Good Communication

Before jumping into the visual tweaks, let's get on the same page about why design matters. A well-designed report does three things very well:

• Builds Trust: A clean, organized report feels professional and credible. A messy one makes users question the data, even if it's perfectly accurate.
• Reduces Cognitive Load: The human brain can only process so much information at once. Good design directs the user's attention, making it easy to spot key trends and insights without getting overwhelmed.
• Drives Adoption: If a report is easy to use and understand, people will use it. If it’s confusing, they’ll revert to asking for CSV exports and manual updates - the very thing you were trying to avoid.

Think of yourself less as a report builder and more as a data storyteller. Your goal is to guide your audience to an important conclusion as quickly and easily as possible.

Start with a Plan, Not a Blank Canvas

The biggest design mistake is opening Power BI and immediately starting to drag visualizations onto the page. The most effective reports are planned out before a single chart is ever created.

1. Know Your Audience

Who is this report for? What one thing do they need to know above all else? The needs of a CEO are vastly different from those of a marketing campaign manager.

• Executives (C-Suite): They need a high-level, "at-a-glance" overview. Focus on key performance indicators (KPIs), major trends, and progress toward goals. They have about 30 seconds to spare.
• Managers: They need to see performance trends to manage their teams. They might want to compare regions, track team performance, and understand what's working and what isn't.
• Analysts & Specialists: These users crave detail. They need the ability to slice, dice, and filter data to uncover root causes and explore granular information.

Tailoring the report to the user's needs is the first step toward a design that works.

2. Define the Report's Narrative

What story are you telling? A report without a clear narrative is just a collection of charts. Guide your user through the data logically.

A common and effective structure is the inverted pyramid. Start with the most important, high-level information at the top, and then provide more detailed, granular data below. This approach lets executives get the main points quickly, while analysts can continue scrolling or drilling down for more context.

3. Sketch a Wireframe

Grab a pen and paper - or use a tool like Figma or Balsamiq - and sketch a low-fidelity layout of your report. This forces you to think about spacing, placement, and flow before you get bogged down in technical details. During this stage, ask yourself:

• Where will the main KPIs go? (Hint: an F-pattern is common, so the top-left is prime real estate).
• Where will you place your filters and slicers?
• How will you group related charts and visuals?
• Which visual will be the largest or most prominent?

A five-minute sketch can save you hours of rearranging visuals later.

Mastering Layout, Spacing, and a Clean Grid

Structure is the foundation of good design. A consistent layout makes your report feel cohesive and professional.

Use a Grid and Align Everything

The human eye loves alignment. Misaligned elements create a subtle sense of chaos and make a report look sloppy. Power BI has built-in tools to help with this.

Under the 'View' tab, make sure to enable "Snap objects to grid" and "Show gridlines." This will make it far easier to ensure that all your visuals and their components (like titles and axes) are perfectly aligned. The space between your charts should be consistent, and the tops of adjacent charts should line up.

Whitespace Is an Active Element, Not Empty Space

Whitespace (or negative space) is the empty area around your visuals. The temptation is to fill every single pixel of the report page with a chart. Don’t do it. Whitespace gives your visuals room to breathe, reduces the feeling of clutter, and helps guide the user's eye from one section to another. A cramped report is an intimidating report.

Create a Clear Visual Hierarchy

Not all information is equally important. Visual hierarchy is the practice of arranging elements to show their order of importance.

• Size: Make the most important visual larger than the others.
• Position: As mentioned, people tend to read in a "Z" or "F" pattern, starting from the top-left. Place your cornerstone metric there. Usually, this means KPI cards for high-level numbers like "Total Revenue" or "Total Users" go right at the top.
• Grouping: Use shapes or subtle background color boxes to group related metrics. For instance, put all your sales-related charts inside one container and all your marketing-related charts in another. This instantly tells the user how the information is organized.

Choosing the Right Chart for the Right Job

A pie chart with 20 slices is not a useful visual. Using the appropriate chart type is essential for clear communication.

Common Chart Types and Their Best Use Cases:

• KPI Cards: For displaying a single, critical number that needs to be seen immediately (e.g., Total MRR).
• Line Charts: The undisputed champion for showing a continuous trend over time (e.g., website traffic per month).
• Bar/Column Charts: Perfect for comparing categories (e.g., sales by product category) or ranking items (e.g., top 5 performing salespeople). Stick to vertical column charts for time-series data and horizontal bar charts if you have long category labels.
• Tables and Matrices: When you need to show precise values or allow for detailed, tabular viewing. They aren't fancy, but they are incredibly functional for users who need the raw numbers.
• Maps: The obvious choice for visualizing geographical data (e.g., revenue by state).
• Scatter Plots: Ideal for showing the relationship or correlation between two different numerical variables (e.g., advertising spend vs. sales).

Pro-Tip: Avoid 3D charts, gauges, and funnel charts unless you have a very specific business reason. They often distort the data and take up more space than a simple bar or line chart would while offering less clarity.

Color: Use It with Intention

"Colorful" doesn't mean "good." Using too many colors is a common rookie mistake that creates visual noise. Color should serve a purpose by highlighting insight or creating brand consistency.

Stick to a Limited Palette

Try to use a small, defined color palette. Two or three primary colors and a few neutral shades (like grey) are usually sufficient. If you have brand guidelines, use your official company colors. If not, tools like Adobe Color can help you generate a professional palette that works well together.

Use Color to Convey Meaning

Don't assign colors randomly. Use them intentionally:

• Categorical: Assign a distinct color to each category (e.g., in a stacked bar chart showing product types).
• Sequential: Use shades of a single color to represent a range from low to high (e.g., making lower revenue states a light blue and higher revenue states a dark blue on a map).
• Diverging: Use two contrasting colors with a neutral midpoint to show values that diverge from a central point (e.g., red for negative profit, grey for zero, green for positive profit).
• Highlighting: The most powerful technique. Use a muted color, like grey, for all your categories and a single, bright accent color to draw attention to the most important data point.

Check for Accessibility

Design for everyone. Roughly 1 in 12 men are colorblind. Choose color combinations that have sufficient contrast and aren't reliant solely on red/green distinctions. Power BI has several built-in color-blind safe themes to help you with this.

Perfecting Text and Fonts for Readability

Typography is an often-overlooked component of report design.

• Font Choice: Stick with clean, sans-serif fonts that are easy to read on a screen. The default Segoe UI in Power BI is a safe bet, but others like Arial, Verdana, or Calibri also work well. Avoid novelty or serif fonts.
• Size and Consistency: Use a consistent hierarchy for your text. For example, all chart titles should be 12-point bold, all axis labels should be 10-point regular, and all data labels should be 9-point regular. This consistency makes the report far easier to scan.
• Clarity: Write clear, concise titles for your reports and visuals. A chart titled "Sales" is okay, but "Monthly Recurring Revenue Trend" is much better. Remove any jargon or acronyms your audience may not understand.

Improve User Experience with Interactivity

Lastly, a great-looking report should also be a pleasure to use.

• Intuitive Filters: Group all your slicers and filters together in one consistent location, like a dedicated filter pane on the left or right side of the report. This functions like a navigation bar, giving users a central place to interact with the report.
• Smart Tooltips: Customize your tooltips. Instead of just showing the default values on hover, create a custom tooltip page that shows additional, related charts or data points. This allows users to get more context without cluttering the main report page.
• Guided Navigation: Use buttons and bookmarks to create a guided experience, especially in complex, multi-page reports. Instead of relying on the page tabs, you can create a "home page" or "contents page" with buttons that navigate users to specific views.

Final Thoughts

Making a Power BI report look good isn't about artistic talent, it's about clear communication. By focusing on your audience, planning your layout, and purposefully using elements like charts, colors, and space, you elevate your work from a simple data file into a strategic tool that empowers your team to make smarter decisions.

Learning all these design principles and the technical complexities of Power BI takes a significant investment of time. For teams who want to build stunning, real-time reports without becoming BI experts, we built Graphed. It's an AI data analyst that allows you to connect your data sources in seconds and create dashboards using simple, natural language. Instead of spending hours aligning charts, you can just ask for "a line chart of Shopify revenue vs Facebook Ads spend this quarter," and have an interactive visualization ready in an instant.