How to Use Card in Power BI

Need to show a single, crucial number at the top of your report? A card visual in Power BI is exactly what you’re looking for. These simple yet powerful visuals are designed to highlight your most important metrics, making them front and center for anyone viewing your dashboard. This tutorial will walk you through how to create and customize card visuals to present key performance indicators (KPIs) with clarity and impact.

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What is a Power BI Card and Why Use One?

A Power BI card is a visualization that displays a single aggregated value, like total sales, customer count, or average transaction value. Its purpose is to make a simple fact, a number, stand on its own. While other charts like bar graphs or line charts show trends and comparisons, a card answers one fundamental question: "What is our number right now?"

There are two primary types of cards in Power BI:

• Card (Single Number): This is the most common type, used to display one key metric. It's perfect for the "hero" number on a dashboard.
• Multi-row Card: This functions like a simple list or table, displaying several related data points in individual rows within one visual boundary.

You should use a card when you want to:

• Spotlight a Major KPI: Place your most critical business metric like "Total Revenue This Quarter" or "Active Users Today" in an impossible-to-miss card at the top of your report.
• Track a Target: Cards are excellent for showing your progress against a specific goal. You can even use conditional formatting to change its color if you're ahead of or behind your target.
• Provide a Quick Summary: When users want an immediate overview without digging into complex charts, a row of well-placed cards can provide a summary of business health.

How to Create a Standard Card Visual (Step-by-Step)

Creating a card is one of the most straightforward tasks in Power BI. Let's walk through it with a common example: displaying total sales.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

Before you build anything, you need data in your Power BI model. For this example, let's assume you've loaded a sales table that contains a column with revenue data, which we'll call "SalesAmount."

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Step 2: Add the Card Visual to Your Report Canvas

In the Visualizations pane on the right-hand side of Power BI Desktop, find the icon that looks like a tag with "123" on it. This is the Card visual. Click it to add an empty card to your report canvas.

Step 3: Add Your Data Field to the Card

With the new blank card selected on your canvas, look at the Visualizations pane again. You will see a data well labeled "Fields." Drag the "SalesAmount" field from your dataset in the Data pane and drop it into this "Fields" well.

Power BI will instantly aggregate the "SalesAmount" column - by default, it will calculate the sum. Your card will now display the total sales from your dataset. Just like that, you have a functional card!

Changing the Aggregation

What if you wanted to show the average sale amount instead of the total? Easy. In the "Fields" well, click the small down arrow next to your "SalesAmount" field. A dropdown menu will appear with different summarization options like Sum, Average, Minimum, Maximum, Count (Distinct), and more. Select Average, and the card will update to show the new calculation.

Customizing Your Power BI Card for Maximum Impact

A basic card does the job, but customization is how you make your data story more than functional. By adjusting colors, fonts, and labels, you can draw attention and add crucial context to your numbers.

To start customizing, select your card and click the Format your visual icon (it looks like a paintbrush) in the Visualizations pane.

Formatting the Data Value (Callout Value)

The main number on your card is called the "Callout value." Under the Visual tab in the format pane, expand the Callout value section. Here you can:

• Font: Change the font family, font size, color, and style (bold, italic, underline). Make this number big and bold to ensure it grabs attention.
• Display units: By default, Power BI might auto-format large numbers (e.g., showing $2.5M instead of $2,500,000). You can manually set this to Thousands, Millions, Billions, or leave it as Auto or None for the full number.
• Value decimal places: Control the precision of your number by specifying the number of decimal places to show.

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Managing the Category Label

The "Category label" is the small text that appears below the callout value, automatically generated from the name of the data field. You can format it or turn it off completely.

Expand the Category label section. Here you can format its font, color, and size just like the callout value. Many report builders turn the default category label off and use the chart's Title for more control and clearer wording.

Improving Readability with General Properties

Head to the General tab in the formatting pane to find more options:

• Title: Turn this on to give your card a proper heading. For example, instead of the default label "Sum of SalesAmount," you can create a title like "Total Sales Last Quarter." This gives you much better control over the card's context.
• Effects: Here you can add a Background color, a Visual border, or a Shadow. Adding a subtle border or light grey background can help your card stand out on a busy report page.

Pro Tip: Use Conditional Formatting to Tell a Story

Conditional formatting is a game-changer for cards. It allows you to dynamically change a color based on a rule or value. For instance, you can make the sales number turn green when it hits a target or red when it falls short.

1. Select your card and go to the Format your visual pane.
2. Expand the Callout value section.
3. Click the fx button next to the Color option.
4. A new window pops up. Using "rules," you can set up your logic. For example:

Click OK, and now your card’s font color will automatically update based on the total sales value.

Beyond a Single Number: Introducing the Multi-Row Card

Sometimes you need to display a group of related KPIs together without cluttering up your report with a separate card for each one. The Multi-row card is perfect for this. It acts like a compact summary list.

Creating a Multi-Row Card

The creation process is nearly identical to a standard card:

1. In the Visualizations pane, select the Multi-row card icon (directly next to the single card icon).
2. With the empty visual selected, drag all the metrics you want to display into the "Fields" well.
3. For example, you could drag in "Total Sales," "Total Profit," and "Number of Transactions."

The visual will automatically create a list, showing each metric and its corresponding value in a separate row.

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Customizing the Multi-Row Card

The formatting options are very similar to the standard card. In the Format your visual pane, you'll find sections to customize:

• Callout values: Controls the look of all the numeric values in the list.
• Category labels: Customize the look of the metric names.
• Cards: This section is unique to the Multi-row card. It allows you to adjust the accent bar (a colored line next to each row for visual flair) and manage padding and spacing between the rows.

Tips for Designing Effective Power BI Cards

Creating a card isn't hard, but creating an effective one requires a bit of design thinking. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Context is Everything: A number like "14,352" means nothing on its own. Use a clear title or pair your card with other visuals to provide context. For example, place a card for "Total Units Sold" above a bar chart showing units sold by category.
• Less Is More: The strength of a card lies in its simplicity. Avoid clutter. Your dashboard is not a place where more is better. Stick to the most valuable KPIs and don’t be afraid of using whitespace around your cards.
• Be Consistent: When using multiple cards in a row, make sure your formatting is consistent. All card callout values should be the same font size and all titles should align. This creates a clean, professional look.
• Use Cards as Navigational Aids: You can turn cards into interactive buttons. In Power BI, you can overlay a blank button on a card and assign it an action, like "Drill through to details page."
• Check Display Units: Double-check how Power BI auto-formats your numbers. Presenting a sales number of "$1M" is great for a big-picture view, but it could be misleading if your audience needs precision down to the last dollar.

Final Thoughts

The Power BI card, in both its single and multi-row forms, is a fundamental tool for building effective dashboards. By showcasing your most critical numbers with clarity, cards help you transform raw data into quick, easy insights that guide better business decisions. Master their creation and customization, and you’ll significantly improve the readability of your reports.

Of course, building reports card by card in tools like Power BI can be deeply rewarding but also incredibly time-consuming, especially when you're pulling data from many different places. We've found that marketing and sales teams often spend more time stitching data together than analyzing it. To fix this, you can use Graphed to connect all your data sources - from Google Analytics and Facebook Ads to Salesforce and Shopify - and build real-time dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English. This approach lets you get to the same powerful insights instantly, without the steep learning curve and without manually building every single visual.