How Many Charts in Power BI?
Thinking about using Power BI and trying to figure out if it has the right visuals for your data? The short answer is yes, and then some. This article breaks down exactly how many charts are available in Power BI, from the built-in visuals to the thousands you can add from the marketplace.
Power BI's Built-In Arsenal: Your Starting Toolkit
When you first open Power BI Desktop, you’re greeted with a solid collection of around 30 to 40 "native" or "standard" visuals right out of the box. This number fluctuates slightly as Microsoft adds new options and refines existing ones with each monthly update, but the core set is incredibly robust and covers the vast majority of common data visualization needs.
Think of these as the fundamental tools in your data analysis workshop. They’re the tried-and-true charts and graphs you're likely familiar with, optimized for performance and seamlessly integrated into the Power BI experience. Here’s a look at the heavy hitters and what they’re used for:
Bar and Column Charts
These are your workhorses for comparing values across different categories. They're excellent for answering questions like, "Which product category generated the most revenue last quarter?" or "How do sales figures compare across our different sales reps?"
Clustered Bar/Column Chart: Great for comparing a main category and a sub-category, like sales per region, broken down by year.
Stacked Bar/Column Chart: Ideal for showing the total of a category while also displaying the parts that make up that total. For example, total website traffic per month, with the bar stacked by traffic source (Organic, Social, Direct).
100% Stacked Bar/Column Chart: Use this when you care more about the proportion or percentage of each part within a whole, rather than the absolute totals.
Line and Area Charts
If you need to show a trend over time, these are the charts to use. They are perfect for visualizing how a metric changes across days, months, quarters, or years, making it easy to spot patterns, seasonality, and outliers.
Line Chart: The classic choice for tracking continuous data like monthly sales, website sessions over a year, or stock price fluctuations.
Area Chart: Similar to a line chart, but the area under the line is filled in. This helps emphasize the volume or magnitude of change over time. The stacked area chart variation is fantastic for showing the part-to-whole relationship changing over a time period.
Pie and Donut Charts
Often debated but useful when used correctly, pie and donut charts show the composition of a whole. They're effective when you have just a few categories (ideally fewer than five) and want to show their proportional contribution to a total, like the percentage of sales from different marketing channels.
Maps
Need to visualize geographical data? Power BI offers several map options for plotting data points on a real-world map, allowing you to quickly spot regional trends.
Basic Map and Filled Map: Plot locations as dots or color in entire regions (countries, states, counties) based on a value. A filled map of the U.S. could show sales volume by state, with darker shades representing higher sales.
ArcGIS Map: A more advanced option with additional layers, demographic data, and styling features for deeper geospatial analysis.
Tables and Matrices
Sometimes, the best way to show data is in a classic tabular format. Tables present data in rows and columns, while Matrices are similar to pivot tables in Excel, allowing you to group data by rows and columns with subtotals and totals. They are indispensable for detailed reporting and allowing users to look up specific values.
Scatter and Bubble Charts
Use scatter charts to visualize the relationship between two different numerical values to see if there's a correlation. For example, you could plot marketing spend against revenue to see if more spending leads to more revenue. A bubble chart adds a third dimension, where the size of the bubble represents another value, like plotting cost vs. profit on the axes, with bubble size representing the number of units sold.
Cards, KPIs, and Gauges
These visuals are designed to highlight a single, critical number. A Card is perfect for displaying a key metric like "Total Revenue" or "Users Today" in large, easy-to-read text. A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) visual takes this a step further by showing a value, its progress toward a goal, and the trend over time. Gauges work similarly, showing progress toward a target, much like a speedometer.
The Real Answer: Limitless Visuals with AppSource
While the native visuals are powerful, the true potential of Power BI is unlocked when you discover AppSource. This is Microsoft's official marketplace for Power BI, and it's where the platform goes from having dozens of visuals to potentially thousands.
Think of it as an app store for your data visualizations. Independent developers and companies from around the world create and publish custom visuals on AppSource, many of which are completely free. These visuals fill niche needs that the standard charts might not cover perfectly.
How to Access and Use AppSource Visuals
Getting a custom visual is incredibly simple. In the Visualizations pane in Power BI Desktop:
Click the three dots (...) at the bottom of the icons.
Select "Get more visuals."
This will open the AppSource marketplace directly within Power BI.
You can search by category (e.g., "Time," "Maps," "KPIs"), browse certified visuals, or search for something specific.
Find a visual you like, click "Add," and it will automatically appear in your Visualizations pane, ready to be used just like a native chart.
Examples of Popular Custom Visuals
Diving into AppSource opens up a whole new world. Here are a few examples of specialty charts you can find:
Gantt Chart: Essential for project management, these visuals allow you to display project timelines, task dependencies, and resource allocation.
Word Cloud: An engaging way to visualize text data, showing the frequency of words in customer reviews, survey responses, or articles.
Sunburst Chart: A "multi-level pie chart" that's fantastic for visualizing hierarchical data, like drilling down from product categories to sub-categories to individual products within a single chart.
Infographic Designer: This powerful tool lets you design highly custom, visually appealing charts that look less like standard BI reports and more like custom-designed graphics.
In short, if you can imagine a way to visualize data, there's a good chance someone has already built a visual for it on AppSource.
Want Something Truly Unique? Build Your Own Visuals
For those who need a completely bespoke solution, Power BI’s platform is fully extensible. This is territory for more advanced users, but it highlights that the upper limit on the number of charts is truly infinite.
Charticulator: This is a powerful, free tool from Microsoft Research that allows you to design your own custom visuals without writing any code. It has a graphical interface where you can drag and drop data fields to create flexible, reusable chart layouts.
Power BI Visuals SDK: For developers, Power BI offers an open-source Software Development Kit (SDK). Using common web technologies like D3.js, JavaScript, and TypeScript, developers can build completely custom, high-performance visuals from scratch and import them into Power BI for private use or even publish them to AppSource for others to use.
The Most Important Question: Which Chart Should You Use?
By now, it’s clear that Power BI doesn't have a visual shortage. The real challenge isn’t finding a chart but selecting the right one to tell your data story clearly and accurately. An inappropriate chart choice can confuse your audience or, worse, lead to incorrect conclusions.
Before you drag and drop a visual onto your report canvas, always ask yourself: "What point am I trying to make?"
Here’s a simple cheat sheet:
To show a Comparison: Use a Bar or Column Chart. Humans are excellent at comparing the lengths of bars, making these perfect for ranking items.
To show a Trend Over Time: Use a Line or Area Chart. Connecting data points over a time axis makes spotting trends intuitive.
To show Part-to-Whole Composition: Use a Pie/Donut Chart (for few categories), a Treemap (for hierarchical composition), or a Stacked Column Chart. These help viewers understand the breakdown of a total.
To show a Relationship or Correlation: Use a Scatter Plot. Plotting two variables on the X and Y axes immediately reveals patterns and relationships between them.
To show Geographical Data: Use a Map. When your data has a location component, plotting it on a map is almost always the most effective choice.
Final Thoughts
So, how many charts does Power BI have? It starts with over 30 powerful native visuals, expands to thousands through the AppSource marketplace, and becomes virtually unlimited for those willing to create their own. The platform's flexibility ensures you'll always have the right tool to visualize your data.
Of course, building dashboards involves more than just picking charts, it requires connecting data sources, cleaning data, and learning the tool's interface, which can take a lot of time. Here at Graphed, we simplified this whole process. We built an AI data analyst that connects to your marketing and sales platforms - like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads - and lets you create real-time dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English. No steep learning curve, just connect your data and start asking questions.