How to Combine Two Visuals in Power BI

Building an effective Power BI report often feels like a puzzle - you need all the pieces to fit perfectly on a single screen without overwhelming your audience. Combining two visuals into one is a clever way to save dashboard space, show important relationships between different metrics, and tell a more compelling data story. This article will walk you through the most common techniques for merging charts in Power BI, complete with step-by-step instructions.

Why Combine Visuals in Power BI?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly touch on the "why." Combining visuals isn't just about saving real estate on your report canvas, though that's a great benefit. It's about revealing deeper insights at a glance.

• Context is Everything: Displaying sales volume as bars and profit margin as a line on the same chart instantly shows if high-volume products are also your most profitable.
• Performance vs. Goals: Juxtaposing actual performance (a bar chart) with a target or budget (a line chart) makes it incredibly easy to see where you’re ahead or falling behind.
• Improved Data Storytelling: A single, well-designed combined visual can tell a story that would otherwise require viewers to mentally connect two or more separate charts, reducing cognitive load and making your point more effectively.

When done right, a combined visual delivers more impact than the sum of its parts.

Method 1: Using the Built-in Combo Chart (The Easy Way)

Power BI has a native visual specifically designed for this purpose: the Line and clustered column chart (or its sibling, the Line and stacked column chart). This is the simplest and most robust way to combine bars and a line, making it perfect for comparing a magnitude (like revenue) with a rate or value (like a percentage or average). Follow these steps to create one.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Combo Chart

Let's imagine we have sales data and want to show monthly sales revenue alongside the corresponding profit margin percentage.

1. Select the Combo Chart Visual

In the Visualizations pane on the right-hand side of your Power BI canvas, find and click on the "Line and clustered column chart" icon. This will add an empty visual placeholder to your report.

2. Add Your Shared Axis

A combo chart needs a common dimension to make sense. This is typically a date, like month or year, or a category, like product type. Drag your shared field (e.g., 'Month') from the Data pane into the X-axis field well in the Visualizations pane.

3. Add a Measure for the Columns (Bars)

Decide which metric you want to display as bars. This is usually the primary metric you want to measure in volume. Drag that measure (e.g., 'Total Sales') into the Column y-axis field well.

At this point, you'll see a standard column chart. Now for the magic part.

4. Add a Measure for the Line

Now, drag the second measure you want to visualize (e.g., 'Profit Margin %') into the Line y-axis field well. Instantly, Power BI will add a line chart overlaid on top of your columns and automatically create a secondary Y-axis on the right side of the visual.

And that's it! You've successfully combined two visuals into one clean and informative combo chart.

Formatting Tips for Your Combo Chart

• Clarify the Y-Axes: Your column values are read against the left Y-axis, and your line values are read against the right. Go to the Format your visual tab (the paintbrush icon), navigate to Y-axis > Secondary y-axis, and give it a clear title so users know exactly what the line represents.
• Data Labels: Consider turning on data labels for one or both metrics to make raw numbers easily readable without hovering. This can be found under the Format your visual tab.
• Color Choice: Use distinct, high-contrast colors to distinguish the columns from the line. Under Columns and Line in the format settings, you can customize the colors to match your brand or highlight specific trends.

Method 2: Layering Visuals for Custom Combinations (The Flexible Way)

What if you want to combine charts that aren’t a simple bar-and-line combo? For example, perhaps you want to overlay two area charts or put a scatter plot over a map. While trickier, this can be achieved by layering a transparent visual on top of an opaque one. This method offers much more flexibility but requires careful alignment.

Step-by-Step Guide to Layering Visuals

Let's use an example where we want to display sales performance as a bar chart and overlay a fixed, dotted line representing the monthly sales target.

1. Create Your Base Visual

First, create the chart you want in the background. In our case, that’s a standard clustered column chart showing 'Total Sales' by 'Month'. Format it exactly how you want it to appear.

Pro Tip: Disable the title and legends for now if you plan to use a single, unified title for the combined visual later.

2. Create Your Top Visual

Next, create the second visual you want to place on top. We'll use a standard Line chart. Drag 'Month' to the X-axis and 'Sales Target' to the Y-axis. This gives you a simple line chart representing our target.

3. Align the Axes – The Most Important Step!

For this technique to work, the axes of both charts must match perfectly. If one chart’s Y-axis runs from 0 to 100,000 and the other runs from 0 to 120,000, your layered visual will be misleading.

• Select your base chart (the column chart). Go to the Format your visual pane > Y-axis > Range. Manually set the Minimum and Maximum values. For example, set it from 0 to $150,000.
• Now, select your top chart (the line chart). Do the same exact thing for its Y-axis: manually set the Minimum to 0 and the Maximum to $150,000. This ensures both charts are plotted on the identical scale.

4. Make the Top Visual Transparent

This is where the illusion comes together. You need to make the background of your top visual completely transparent so the bottom visual can show through.

• Select the top line chart visual.
• In the Format your visual pane, go to General > Effects.
• Find the Background toggle and turn it off. If you turn it off, you don't need to adjust the transparency.
• While you’re here, tidy up the top visual. Turn off its X-axis, Y-axis, titles, and legends. You only want the line series itself to be visible - the rest of the context will come from the bottom chart.

5. Layer and Group the Visuals

Finally, click and drag your now-transparent line chart directly over your column chart until the axes and plot areas align perfectly. Because you manually set the axis ranges, the data points should line up correctly.

To ensure they always move and resize together, select both visuals by holding Ctrl and clicking on each one. Then, right-click on one of them, select Group and Group again. Now they are treated as a single object.

Best Practices for Creating Combined Visuals

Whether you're using a combo chart or layering, a few design principles will help ensure your creation is insightful, not confusing.

• Don't Overcomplicate It: It’s tempting to overlay multiple lines on a column chart, but this quickly becomes a 'spaghetti chart'. Stick to two, maybe three, distinct metrics to keep the visual clean and readable.
• Tell a Cohesive Story: Only combine metrics that have a logical relationship. Revenue and customer count? Great. Website traffic and office supply expenses? Not so much, unless you can prove a compelling correlation.
• Use a Secondary Axis Wisely: When measurements have vastly different scales (like sales in millions of dollars and a CSAT score out of 5), a secondary axis is a necessity. Just be sure to label it very clearly so a user doesn't misinterpret a low-value number as being high on the primary scale.
• Color Matters: Use colors to your advantage. Make your primary metric bold and your secondary metric a more subtle, complementary color. Avoid colors that are too similar, as this can make your chart difficult to read for those with color vision deficiencies.

Final Thoughts

You can effectively combine two visuals in Power BI either by using the straightforward built-in combo chart or by the more flexible method of layering transparent visuals. These techniques help consolidate information, reveal key business trends at a glance, and create a clearer, more engaging reporting experience for your audience.

We know that manually combining and configuring visuals in powerful but complex tools like Power BI can be time-consuming. That’s why we built Graphed to automate the entire process. Instead of dragging and dropping fields and tweaking axis ranges, you can just connect your data sources once and use plain English prompts like, “Show me my e-commerce revenue and marketing spend on a combination chart by month for this year.” We instantly build the correct, live-updating visual for you, turning hours of configuration into a 30-second conversation and giving you back time to focus on the insights, not the setup.