How Many Visuals Are There in Power BI?

Counting the exact number of visuals in Power BI is a bit like counting the number of apps on your phone - the number you start with is just the beginning. The real answer isn’t a single static number, because Power BI’s visualization capabilities are designed to be expanded. This article will walk you through the core set of visuals that come standard, show you how to find hundreds more, and even touch on how you can create your own from scratch.

So, What's the Real Answer?

There isn’t one. The answer changes depending on how you’re using Power BI. Your visualization options fall into three main categories:

• Native Visuals: These are the ~40 standard, out-of-the-box visuals that are built directly into Power BI Desktop. They cover the vast majority of common data visualization needs, from bar charts to maps.
• AppSource Custom Visuals: This is Microsoft's official marketplace where you can find hundreds of additional visuals created by Microsoft and third-party developers. If you need something specific like a Gantt chart or an animated bar race, you’ll find it here.
• Developer-Created Visuals: For highly specific or proprietary needs, developers can create truly custom visuals from the ground up using the Power BI Visuals SDK. This is the advanced path, making the potential number of visuals virtually limitless.

Let's break down what you get in each category so you can get a full picture of Power BI's capabilities.

The Core Toolkit: Power BI's Native Visuals

When you first open Power BI Desktop, the Visualizations pane is populated with a rich set of native charts and tools. These are your workhorses, perfect for everyday analysis and reporting. Think of them as the foundational building blocks of any dashboard. Here’s a look at the main groups.

Bar and Column Charts

These are the most common chart types for a reason: they are incredibly effective for comparing values across different categories. Use them to see which marketing channel drove the most leads or which product line generated the most revenue.

• Stacked Bar/Column Chart: Shows the total and breaks it down by contributing parts. Great for showing a "part-to-whole" relationship, like total sales by region, with each region's bar broken down by product category.
• Clustered Bar/Column Chart: Places bars side-by-side to directly compare values across multiple categories. Perfect for comparing Q1 vs. Q2 sales for the same set of products.
• 100% Stacked Bar/Column Chart: Shows the relative percentage of each sub-category within a total. Use this to see the percentage mix of product sales in each region, regardless of the total sales volume.
• Ribbon Chart: Similar to a stacked column chart, but it also connects the categories with ribbons to show how ranks change over time. It’s fantastic for visualizing which product was #1 month after month.

Line and Area Charts

When you need to show trends over time, these are your go-to visuals. They are indispensable for tracking website sessions, monthly recurring revenue, or any other metric that changes chronologically.

• Line Chart: The classic choice for showing a trend. Ideal for plotting daily users or stock prices.
• Area Chart: Builds on the line chart by shading the area underneath the line, which helps emphasize the volume or magnitude of change over time.
• Stacked Area Chart: Similar to a stacked column chart, but shows the trend of contributing parts to a whole over time. Useful for displaying how different streams of traffic contributed to total website visits over a year.

Data Over Sub-category Charts

These visuals combine different chart types to tell a more nuanced story in a single graphic. They’re excellent for comparing two different types of measures, like volume and value.

• Line and Stacked Column Chart: Overlays a line chart on a stacked column chart. You could use this to show total revenue by month (columns) with a profit margin percentage (line) laid over it.
• Line and Clustered Column Chart: Does the same, but with side-by-side columns, allowing for more direct comparisons of the column categories.
• Waterfall Chart: Shows a running total as values are added or subtracted. It’s the standard for financial reporting, visualizing how a starting value (like initial revenue) is affected by positive and negative changes to arrive at a final result.

Slicers, Tables, & Matrices

Sometimes the best way to show data is just to show the data. These visuals are essential for providing deep-dive details and allowing users to filter and interact with your reports.

• Table: Presents data in a standard two-dimensional grid of rows and columns, just like a spreadsheet.
• Matrix: Similar to a table, but it supports a stepped layout and allows you an experience similar to pivot tables, with rows, columns, and values. You can drill down into hierarchies.
• Slicer: These aren't for displaying data but for filtering it. Slicers are interactive, on-canvas filters that let users easily segment the report data (e.g., by date, region, or product category).

Pie, Donut, TreeMap, and Sunburst Charts

When showing how parts relate to a whole, these visuals are often used. A word of caution: they become hard to read with too many categories, so they are best used for a handful of distinct segments.

• Pie Chart & Donut Chart: The classic (and often debated) way to show proportions. They're best suited for data with few categories, such as displaying market share among three main competitors.
• Treemap: Displays hierarchical data as a set of nested rectangles. The size of each rectangle represents its value, making it easy to spot the largest components of a whole, such as sales contributions by product sub-categories.

Maps and Geographic Visuals

When your data has a location component, maps are essential. Power BI offers several powerful options for plotting data points and shapes on a map.

• Map: Places bubbles over geographic locations, with the size of the bubble representing a value.
• Filled Map: Colors in entire geographic areas (like countries, states, or zip codes) based on a value. Great for creating heat maps of sales density.
• ArcGIS Map: A very powerful, layered mapping visual that supports multiple data layers, demographic data, and advanced geographic analysis.
• Shape Map: Allows you to use custom maps (like a factory floor plan or a sales territory map) and color different regions based on your data.

Cards, KPIs, and Gauges

For highlighting single, critical numbers, these visuals are essential. They form the headline of your dashboard, immediately telling users a key metric.

• Card: Displays a single, important number, like total revenue or number of active users. It's simple but highly effective.
• Multi-row card: Shows multiple related single numbers in a compact list format.
• KPI (Key Performance Indicator): Not only shows a key value but also its progress toward a target, along with a trend. Essential for goals-based reporting.
• Gauge: A radial gauge that displays a single value and shows its progress toward a goal or within a range.

AI-Powered Visuals

Power BI includes several visuals that use machine learning to uncover insights you might otherwise miss. They can help answer the "why" behind your data.

• Q&A: Allows users to ask questions about the data in natural language (e.g., "what were the top 5 products by sales last quarter?") and get an answer in the form of a chart or graph.
• Key Influencers: Analyzes your data to find the key drivers behind an outcome. For example, it could tell you what factors most influence a customer to churn.
• Decomposition Tree: An interactive visual that lets you drill down into dimensions to understand the root cause of a value. You can start with "Total Sales" and break it down by region, then by salesperson, then by product, to see the full path.
• Smart Narrative: Automatically generates a text summary of the key takeaways from a specific visual or from the entire report page, helping to explain what the data is showing.

Beyond the Basics: Power BI AppSource

After you’ve mastered the native visuals, you'll eventually run into a scenario where you need something more specific. That’s where AppSource comes in.

What is AppSource?

AppSource is Microsoft’s marketplace for business applications, including hundreds of custom visuals for Power BI. Some are highly specialized (Tornado charts, Chord diagrams) while others offer more formatting options than their native counterparts (Ultimate Waterfall, Advanced Card). Many are free, some have paid features, and all are vetted by Microsoft for security and quality.

How to Add AppSource Visuals

Adding a new visual takes just a few clicks:

1. In the Visualizations pane, click the three dots (...).
2. Select "Get more visuals."
3. The AppSource window will appear, allowing you to search, filter by category, and browse.
4. Find a visual you want, select it, and click "Add." It will now appear in your Visualizations pane for use in your report.

Popular AppSource Visuals

While there are hundreds to choose from, here are a few fan favorites that fill common gaps:

• Gantt Chart: Essential for project management, this visual helps track project timelines, tasks, and dependencies.
• Word Cloud: A fun and intuitive way to visualize text data, like customer reviews or survey responses, where more frequent words appear larger.
• Infographic Designer: Allows you to create highly stylized, infographic-style visuals that are more engaging than standard charts.
• Chiclet Slicer: Offers more styling options than the native slicer, presenting filtering options as sleek buttons that can even include images.

Using AppSource dramatically expands your options from around 40 to well over 400, ensuring you can find a certified and ready-to-use visual for almost any scenario.

Pushing the Limits: Creating Your Own Visuals

For those rare instances where even AppSource doesn't have what you need, Power BI provides tools for creating your own bespoke visuals. This is a more advanced route, but it's what makes the platform truly limitless.

The Power BI Visuals SDK

Developers who are comfortable with web technologies like TypeScript, D3.js, or R can use the open-source SDK to build visuals from scratch. This allows for complete control over the appearance, interactivity, and functionality of the visual. Businesses often use this to create proprietary visuals that reflect their unique data or branding.

Charticulator

A more user-friendly option for creating custom visuals without code is Charticulator. Developed by Microsoft Research, it’s a tool that provides a drag-and-drop interface for designing unique chart layouts and binding data to them. Once created, you can export these designs as custom visuals and import them into Power BI.

Final Thoughts

So, how many visuals are in Power BI? It starts with a comprehensive set of around 40 built-in visuals, expands into the hundreds through the AppSource marketplace, and becomes virtually infinite if you decide to build your own. This flexible system ensures you have the right tool for any data storytelling task you encounter.

While Power BI offers a vast library of visuals, the real work lies in connecting your disparate data sources and knowing what questions to ask. Since our team often needs fast answers from our sales and marketing platforms without getting bogged down in chart configurations, we built Graphed. It uses natural language to build dashboards, so instead of clicking through visual settings, we can just ask, "Show me our campaign ROI from Facebook Ads versus Google Ads last quarter," and instantly get the answer. It lets us focus on strategy, not setup.