How to Create a Chart in Power BI

Creating your first chart in Power BI can feel intimidating, but it's actually a surprisingly straightforward process once you understand the basic components. This article will walk you through building your first visual from scratch, from connecting your data to customizing the final design. We'll cover the fundamentals of creating a bar chart and then touch on a few other common chart types to get you started.

First Things First: Preparing Your Data for Visualization

Before you even think about charts, you need to make sure your data is ready to go. The quality of your visualization depends entirely on the quality of your underlying data. Garbage in, garbage out.

Connecting to a Data Source

Power BI can connect to an incredible number of data sources, from simple Excel files to complex SQL databases. For this tutorial, let's focus on the most common starting point: an Excel workbook or a CSV file.

Open Power BI Desktop. In the main Home tab of the ribbon, you'll see immediate options like Get Data, Excel workbook, and SQL server.
Click on Excel workbook (or click Get Data > Excel workbook).
Navigate to your file, select it, and click Open.
A Navigator window will pop up, showing you all the available tables and sheets within your workbook. Check the box next to the table or sheet you want to use. You'll see a preview on the right.
Click Load to bring the data directly into your Power BI model. If you know your data needs cleaning (e.g., has empty rows, incorrect column headers, or wrong data types), click Transform Data instead.

A Quick Look at Power Query

Clicking Transform Data opens the Power Query Editor, which is where the real data prep magic happens. You don't need to be an expert here to get started, but it's helpful to know what it's for. In Power Query, you can:

Remove unwanted rows or columns: Get rid of blank rows at the top or irrelevant columns narrowing your focus.
Change data types: Make sure your dates are recognized as dates, numbers as numbers, and text as text. This is crucial for creating accurate charts. For example, if your 'Sales' column is incorrectly set to "Text," you won't be able to sum it up in a chart.
Split columns or merge them: You can split a "Full Name" column into "First Name" and "Last Name," for example.
Replace values: Correct typos or standardize entries (e.g., changing "USA" and "U.S." to "United States").

Once you're happy with your data, click Close & Apply in the top-left corner of the Power Query Editor to load your clean data into your Power BI report.

Understanding the Power BI Report View

After loading your data, you'll be in the Report View, which is your main canvas for building dashboards. Let's get familiar with the key areas you'll be using.

The Canvas: The large blank area in the middle is your canvas. This is where you'll drag and drop to build and arrange your charts.
The Fields Pane: On the far right, you'll see a list of all your data tables. You can click the arrow next to a table name to expand it and see all the columns (or "fields") inside it. This is where you'll get the raw materials for your charts.
The Visualizations Pane: Just to the left of the Fields pane, this is your toolbox of charts. It shows icons for bar charts, line charts, pie charts, maps, and many more. This is where you'll pick the type of chart you want to create and configure it.
The Filters Pane: To the left of the Visualizations Pane (you may need to expand it), this is where you can apply filters to your visuals, an entire page, or your whole report.

Step-by-Step: Creating a Bar Chart

Ready to build? Let's create a simple bar chart to visualize sales by product category. This is one of the most common and useful charts for comparing values across different groups.

Step 1: Select the Chart Type

In the Visualizations pane, find the icon for the Stacked bar chart and click on it. A blank placeholder for your new visual will appear on the canvas. You can click and drag its corners to resize it.

Step 2: Add Your Data

With the new blank chart selected, look at the bottom half of the Visualizations pane. You'll see several "wells" or boxes, such as Y-axis, X-axis, and Legend. Your goal is to drag fields from the Fields pane into these wells to build the chart.

Let's say our data has a Product Category column and a Sales Amount column.

From the Fields pane, find your Product Category field. Click, hold, and drag it into the Y-axis well.
Next, find your Sales Amount field. Click, hold, and drag it into the X-axis well.

As soon as you do this, you'll see the chart instantly come to life on the canvas! You have a bar for each product category, with the length of the bar representing its total sales amount. Power BI automatically adds up all the sales for each category.

Making Your Chart Shine: Customizing and Formatting

A functional chart is great, but a well-formatted chart is even better. Good formatting makes your chart easier to read and understand. With your chart selected, click the paintbrush icon (Format your visual) at the top of the Visualizations pane to see all your options.

Key Formatting Options to Know:

Title: Found under the General tab, this is one of the most important things to customize. Your chart title should clearly explain what the viewer is looking at. Instead of the default "Sum of Sales Amount by Product Category," you might change it to "Total Sales by Product Category." You can change the text, font, size, and color here.
Y-axis and X-axis: Under the Visual tab, you can turn the axis titles on or off, change their font and color, and adjust the range of values if needed.
Bars (or Columns): This is where you can change the colors of your bars. You can set a default color or click Show all to assign a specific color to each category. This is great for aligning your report with company brand colors.
Data labels: This is a powerful feature. Toggling this on will display the actual sales value on or next to each bar. This prevents your audience from having to guess or estimate values based on the axis, making your chart much more precise.
Gridlines: You can change the style (e.g., from solid to dashed) or color of your gridlines, or remove them entirely for a cleaner look.

Take your time playing with these options. Small adjustments can make a big difference in the clarity and professional polish of your final report.

Exploring Other Essential Chart Types

Once you've mastered the bar chart, the process for creating other visuals is very similar. It's all about picking the right chart for the data and question and then dragging the right fields into the right wells.

Line Chart for Trends Over Time

Use it to: Show how a value changes over a continuous period. It's perfect for tracking metrics like monthly revenue, weekly website sessions, or daily temperatures.
How to build it: Select the Line chart visual. Drag your date field (e.g., Order Date) to the X-axis and the value you want to measure (e.g., Revenue) to the Y-axis. Power BI will automatically create a date hierarchy, letting you drill down from year to quarter to month.

Pie Chart for Parts of a Whole

Use it to: Show composition or how different parts make up a total. Think market share by region or a percentage breakdown of a marketing budget.
How to build it: Select the Pie chart visual. Drag a category field (e.g., Lead Source) into the Legend well and a numeric value (e.g., Count of Leads) into the Values well. Be careful not to use a pie chart with more than 5-6 categories, as it can become difficult to read.

Map for Geographical Data

Use it to: Display data geographically. If you have data tied to cities, states, countries, or postal codes, this is the visual to use.
How to build it: Select the Map (or Azure Map) visual. Drag a location field (e.g., State or Country) to the Location well. Then, drag a numeric value (e.g., Sales) to the Bubble size well. This will create circles on the map where larger circles represent higher sales.

Final Thoughts

Building charts in Power BI is a core skill for anyone working with data today. By understanding how to connect data, choose the right visual, and format it clearly, you can start turning raw spreadsheet cells into meaningful insights that drive better-informed decisions.

Creating these visuals manually in complex tools provides a ton of control, but often the biggest bottleneck isn't building the chart itself - it's connecting all the data and figuring out what to build in the first place, especially for marketing and sales teams. Instead of spending hours exporting CSVs and recreating the same reports, we built Graphed to connect to all our tools like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce instantly. We simply use plain English to ask questions like, "Create a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs. revenue by campaign," and the dashboard is created automatically in seconds, letting us get straight to the insights without the setup.