What is the Format Available in Power BI?

Jumping into Power BI often starts with one big goal: turning your raw data into clear, insightful visuals. But right after importing your data, you're faced with a new challenge - making those visuals look professional and easy to understand. Mastering the formatting options is the key to creating reports that not only show data but also tell a compelling story. This guide breaks down the different types of formatting available in Power BI, from the files themselves to the details of every chart and table.

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Understanding Power BI File Formats: .PBIX vs. .PBIT

Before you even begin styling your charts, it’s important to understand the two primary file formats you'll encounter. They serve very different purposes in your reporting workflow.

The .PBIX File (Power BI Report)

A .PBIX file is the standard Power BI file type. Think of it as your complete, self-contained project file. It includes:

• The Data: All the data you've imported into your report from sources like Excel, a database, or a web service.
• The Data Model: The relationships you've created between your data tables.
• The Queries: The steps you took in Power Query to clean and transform your data.
• The Reports: All your report pages, visuals, formatting, and DAX measures.

You'll spend most of your development time working within a .PBIX file. It’s the live document where you build, test, and refine your analysis. It's the file you save, open, and publish to the Power BI service.

The .PBIT File (Power BI Template)

A .PBIT file is a Power BI template. The key difference here is simple but powerful: it contains everything a .PBIX file does, except for the data itself.

Why is this useful? Imagine you’ve built the perfect monthly sales report with your company’s branding, specific chart styles, and a well-defined data model. Now, you want your colleagues on other teams to create the same report using their own sales data. Instead of sending them your .PBIX file and having them try to replace the data source, you can provide a .PBIT template. When a user opens a .PBIT file, Power BI automatically prompts them to connect to their data sources. The report structure, data model, color scheme, and all visual formats are already in place, ensuring brand consistency and saving everyone hours of setup time.

To create a template, simply go to File > Export > Power BI template.

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Mastering the Formatting Pane

Once you’ve started adding visuals to your report canvas, the Formatting Pane will become your best friend. This is your central hub for controlling the look and feel of every single chart, table, card, and slicer. To open it, select a visual on your report canvas, then click the paintbrush icon in the Visualizations pane on the right-hand side.

The pane is generally split into two main tabs: Visual and General.

Visual Formatting Options

This tab contains settings specific to the type of visual you’ve selected. The options will change depending on whether you’re formatting a bar chart, a pie chart, or a line graph. Common settings include:

• X-axis / Y-axis: Modify the color, font size, title, range, and display units of your axes. For a sales report, you might format the Y-axis to show currency in millions instead of full numbers to make it more readable.
• Legend: Turn the legend on or off, change its position (e.g., top, bottom, right), and format the text.
• Bars / Columns / Lines: This is where you control the core appearance. You can change colors for each category, adjust the spacing between bars, add markers to a line chart, or format data markers.
• Data labels: Add labels directly onto your visual elements to show the exact values. You can format the font, color, position (inside or outside the bar), and display units of these labels.
• Gridlines: Adjust the style (solid, dashed, dotted) and color of horizontal and vertical gridlines to make your charts easier to read.

General Formatting Options

These settings are available for almost every visual type and control the container of the visual, not the data elements inside it.

• Title: Change the title text, font, font size, color, background, and alignment. A clear title like "Quarterly Sales Performance by Product Category" is essential for good storytelling. Be sure to check this rather than leaving the default, which may not tell the whole story.
• Effects: Here you can add a background color or image, adjust transparency, add a visual border, or cast a shadow for a nice lift effect. These are subtle formatting touches that can create visual separation between your various charts and tables, making your report easy to follow and more polished overall.
• Header icons: This feature controls the look of the little icons (filter, focus mode, more options) that appear in the top corner of your visual when a user hovers over it.

Formatting Your Data in the Data Model

While the Formatting Pane fine-tunes your visuals, some of the most important formatting happens before you even build a chart. You can set default formatting for your data columns directly in the Data Model. This is incredibly efficient because it ensures that any visual using that data will automatically display it correctly.

For example, instead of formatting a "Revenue" field as currency on every single chart, you can set it once for the entire report. To do that, take the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Data view (the grid icon on the left-hand panel).
2. Select the table and the specific column you want to format (e.g., 'SalesAmount').
3. In the top ribbon, a "Column tools" tab will appear.
4. Here you can change the Data type, select a Format (e.g., Currency, Percentage, Date), and specify more details like the number of decimals to include or choose a specific currency format like USD, EUR, GBP.

Now, whenever you drag the 'SalesAmount' field into a new visual - whether it's a table, a card, or the tooltip of a bar chart - it will always appear with the dollar sign and correct decimal places. Problem solved!

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Advanced Styling with Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting takes your visuals to a new level by dynamically changing visual elements based on the data's values. This powerful feature instantly draws attention to your most important insights without users needing to read a single number.

Imagine you have a bar chart showing sales performance by salesperson. With conditional formatting, you can automatically color the bars green for salespeople who met their target, yellow for those who are close, and red for those who missed it. Here's a quick starter's guide to how it's done.

Applying Conditional Formatting by Rules

1. Select the visual you want to format (e.g., a clustered column chart).
2. In the Formatting Pane, go to the Visual tab.
3. Find the element you want to format. For a column chart, this would be Columns. Open the dropdown and click the fx button next to the Color option.
4. A dialog box will pop up. In the 'Format style' dropdown, select Rules.
5. In the 'Apply to' section, choose the data field your rule will be based on (e.g., 'Sales Target Achievement %').
6. Now, define your rules. You might set up something like:
7. Once you're done, click the OK button and voilà! Your report is now ready for presentation to the stakeholders. Your chart will instantly update, making performance insights jump right off the page.

You can use this method to conditionally format background colors in tables, font colors, and even to add KPI-style icons (like up/down arrows or traffic lights) next to your numbers.

Formatting Your Entire Report with Themes and Page Settings

Finally, to create a truly professional and cohesive report, you need to think about the report as a whole. No one wants to receive a messy presentation that looks unprofessional.

Using Report Themes

Instead of formatting every visual one by one, you can use Themes to apply a consistent set of colors, fonts, and styling rules across your entire report with a single click. Go to the View tab in the main ribbon to find a gallery of built-in themes. You can also customize themes to match your organization’s branding guidelines, define your own color palettes, and set default styling properties for all visual types.

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Formatting the Report Canvas

With no visuals selected, the Formatting Pane controls the settings for the report page itself. Under the 'Canvas settings' dropdown, you can change the size and dimensions of the page - for example, you can switch from a standard (16:9) to a letter or custom format for printing your report on letter paper.

Under 'Canvas background', you can go old-school by changing your report page to any color, adding a background image, or giving it a touch of personality by adjusting its background transparency.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, Power BI formatting goes far beyond just changing the colors of a chart. From your core files and data model to your page themes and conditional rules for your chart - you can control nearly any aspect to create intuitive reports that communicate your valuable business data's story instantly - while looking great! We hope the information from this article will make a positive impact on your reporting workflows! Experimenting with these options is the best way to develop your design skills, so get started and give it a try.

Wrestling with formatting panes and manual report building can take hours away from analyzing your data. Here at Graphed , we simplify this process by using an AI-powered approach. Rather than clicking through numerous menus, you can just describe the dashboard or chart you wish to create in plain, conversational English, and we get it done. Our platform connects directly to all of your data sources like Google Analytics and Salesforce. It generates your dashboards automatically while handling the data cleaning, modeling, and best practices in seconds.