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How to Create a Work in Progress Report in Power BI

Cody Schneider••8 min read

Trying to keep track of every project, task, and deadline can feel like a full-time job in itself. A Work in Progress (WIP) report is your best defense against chaos, giving you a clear, centralized view of exactly what's being worked on, who's doing it, and where things stand. This article will walk you through, step-by-step, how to build a dynamic and interactive WIP report using Microsoft Power BI.

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What is a Work in Progress (WIP) Report?

A Work in Progress report is a project management tool that provides a snapshot of all active tasks and projects. At its core, it tracks the status and progress of work that has started but is not yet complete. Unlike a simple to-do list, a great WIP report is visual, data-driven, and interactive, helping you answer critical questions instantly:

  • What tasks are currently active?
  • Who is responsible for each task?
  • What is the status of each project (e.g., On Track, Blocked, At Risk)?
  • Are any deadlines approaching or overdue?
  • Is any team member overloaded with work?

Moving your WIP tracking from a static spreadsheet to a dynamic tool like Power BI transforms it from a simple list into a powerful decision-making dashboard.

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Before You Begin: Prepping Your Data

Your beautiful Power BI report is only as good as the data you feed it. Before you even open Power BI, you need to have your project data organized. For most teams, this lives in a project management tool, a SharePoint list, or, most commonly, a spreadsheet (like Excel or Google Sheets).

Make sure your data is structured in a simple table format, with clear column headers. Each row should represent a single task or project. Here are the essential columns to include:

  • Task ID: A unique identifier for each task.
  • Task Name: A brief description of the work.
  • Assigned To: The name of the person responsible.
  • Project: The larger project or initiative this task belongs to.
  • Status: The current state of the task (e.g., Not Started, In Progress, Blocked, Completed, Overdue).
  • Start Date: When the task was initiated.
  • Due Date: The deadline for the task.
  • Priority: The task's level of importance (e.g., High, Medium, Low).

Keeping your data clean and consistent here will save you a massive headache later on.

Building Your WIP Report in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

With your data organized, it's time to fire up Power BI Desktop and start building.

Step 1: Connect to Your Data Source

First, you need to pull your project data into Power BI.

  1. On the Power BI home screen or under the Home tab, click Get Data.
  2. Since our data is in Excel, select Excel workbook. If your data is in Google Sheets, you can connect it using the "Web" connector and the sheet's public URL.
  3. Navigate to your saved Excel file and click Open.
  4. In the Navigator window, Power BI will show you the available tables and sheets in your file. Check the box next to your data table (if you formatted it as a table in Excel) or the sheet name. You’ll see a preview of your data.
  5. Instead of clicking Load, click Transform Data. This is a crucial step! It opens the Power Query Editor, where you'll clean and prepare your data for analysis.

Step 2: Clean and Shape Your Data in Power Query

The Power Query Editor is where you can massage your data into the perfect shape for your report. It's incredibly powerful, but we'll stick to the basics.

First, always check your column data types. Power BI is smart, but it sometimes gets things wrong. Click on the icon at the top of each column header to see or change its type. Make sure:

  • Your Start Date and Due Date columns are set to the Date type.
  • Any numerical columns (if you have them) are set to Whole Number or Decimal Number.
  • Everything else is likely fine as the Text type. Correcting this now prevents reporting errors later.

You can also rename columns here by double-clicking the header or removing columns you don't need by right-clicking and selecting "Remove."

Once you're happy, click Close & Apply in the top-left corner. Power BI will load the cleaned data into your report.

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Step 3: Building Your Report Visuals

Now for the fun part! On the left, you'll see your blank report canvas. On the right, you'll see the Visualizations pane and the Fields pane, which lists all the columns from your data table.

Create KPI Cards for a High-Level Overview

Cards are perfect for showing key top-line numbers. Let’s add a few.

  1. In the Visualizations pane, click the Card visual (it looks like a box with "123" in it).
  2. A blank card will appear on your canvas. With it selected, drag the Task ID field into the "Fields" area of the visualization settings.
  3. By default, it will sum them. Click the little dropdown arrow next to "Task ID" in the Fields well and change it to Count (Distinct). This will give you the total number of projects.
  4. Resize and position the card. You can format it under the "Format your visual" tab (the paintbrush icon), changing the title, colors, and font size.
  5. Repeat this process to create cards for Total Completed Tasks or Overdue Tasks. For these, you'll use the Filters pane. For overdue tasks, you'd add a filter where the Status field is Overdue.

Add a Task Status Breakdown Chart

Next, let's see how tasks are distributed across different statuses. A donut chart is great for this.

  1. Click on a blank space on your canvas, then select the Donut chart from the Visualizations pane.
  2. Drag the Status field to the "Legend" box.
  3. Drag the Task ID field to the "Values" box and, just like with the cards, change its aggregation to Count (Distinct).

That's it! You now have a visual breakdown of your workload status. You can customize the colors and labels under the formatting options.

Display a Detailed Task Table

This is the core of your report - a detailed, filterable list of all your work in progress.

  1. Choose the Table or Matrix visual. A matrix is often more flexible.
  2. Drag the fields you want to display into the "Columns" well (for table) or "Rows" and "Values" wells for a matrix. Good starting points include: Task Name, Assigned To, Status, Priority, and Due Date.
  3. You can add conditional formatting to make it easier to read. For example, select the visual, go to the "Format your visual" tab > Cell elements. Here, you can set rules to automatically color-code the Status or Priority cells to make high-priority or blocked items stand out.

Visualize Workload by Team Member

Let's add a bar chart to see who's working on what.

  1. Select the Stacked bar chart visual.
  2. Drag Assigned To to the Y-axis.
  3. Drag Task ID to the X-axis and change it to Count (Distinct).
  4. To make it even more insightful, drag the Status field into the "Legend" field well. Now you have a color-coded bar chart showing each person's total workload and the status of those tasks at a glance.

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Step 4: Make Your Report Interactive with Slicers

The real power of Power BI is its interactivity. Slicers are filters that anyone viewing the report can use to drill down into the data.

  1. Click the Slicer visual in the Visualizations pane.
  2. Drag the Assigned To field into the "Field" well.
  3. Change the slicer's format from a list to a dropdown under the "Format your visual" options to save space.
  4. Add a second slicer for Priority and another for Project.

Now, when you click on a name, priority, or project in a slicer, the entire report - all your cards, charts, and tables - will instantly filter to show data just for that selection.

Final Thoughts

Building this report gives you a powerful and dynamic tool for tracking progress, identifying bottlenecks, and keeping your team aligned. You've successfully connected and cleaned your data, built insightful visuals, and added interactive filters, transforming a simple project list into a fully functional dashboard.

The manual steps involved in exporting data, cleaning it up, and navigating the learning curve of a tool like Power BI can be time-consuming. We built Graphed to solve exactly this problem. Instead of wrestling with data connectors and report builders, you connect your sources in a few clicks - from Shopify and Google Analytics to project management tools - and then simply ask for what you want in plain English. For example, you can tell Graphed: "Create a dashboard showing our project progress by owner and status from my Google Sheet," and it builds the interactive report for you in seconds, keeping it updated automatically.

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