How to Group Visuals in Power BI

A messy Power BI dashboard is an ineffective Power BI dashboard. If your users have to squint to find the key takeaways among a sea of misaligned charts and cards, you've already lost them. This article will show you how to use one of the simplest yet most powerful features - grouping - to bring order to your reports, improve user experience, and save yourself a ton of development time.

Why Bother Grouping Visuals in Power BI?

Before jumping into the "how," it's important to understand the "why." Grouping visuals isn't just a minor organizational trick, it fundamentally improves both your report-building process and the final user experience. If you’ve ever spent what feels like an eternity trying to nudge ten different KPI cards into perfect alignment, you already understand part of the value.

Here are the biggest benefits of grouping elements on your report canvas:

• Control the Clutter: The most obvious benefit is organization. Grouping related elements like a set of KPI cards, a chart and its corresponding slicers, or a branded header section cleans up your canvas and makes the report feel intentional and professional.
• Effortless Alignment and Movement: Once visuals are in a group, you can move them all at once. The relative spacing and alignment between the visuals in the group is locked in. No more moving one chart and then having to individually adjust three other visuals to match.
• Consistent Formatting: You can apply formatting options, like a background color or a border, to the entire group at once. This creates clean, visually distinct sections in your report, guiding the user's eye to related information.
• Simplified Layer Management: Complex reports often involve overlapping visuals. Grouping makes it far easier to manage these layers, allowing you to bring an entire set of elements forward or send them backward with a single click.
• Powerful Interactivity (with Bookmarks): This is the advanced trick. When you combine groups with bookmarks and the Selection Pane, you can create dynamic reports where users click buttons to show or hide entire sections of visuals. This is the key to building clean, app-like experiences within Power BI.

In short, grouping turns a collection of individual parts into a cohesive, manageable whole. It’s a core skill for anyone who wants to build reports that are not only functional but also clean and easy to use.

The Step-by-Step Guide to Grouping Visuals

Creating a group is straightforward. Once you've done it a couple of times, it will become second nature in your Power BI workflow. Let's walk through the process.

Step 1: Select Your Visuals to Group

First, you need to tell Power BI which elements you want to group together. Hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard and click on each visual you want to include in the group. As you click, you'll see a faint bounding box appear around each selected item.

Pro Tip: You can also "lasso" the visuals. Just click and drag your mouse on an empty area of the canvas to draw a rectangle over all the visuals you want to select. Everything enclosed by the rectangle will be selected.

Step 2: Find and Use the 'Group' Command

Once you have your visuals selected, you have two easy ways to create the group:

Method 1: The Right-Click Menu

With all your target visuals selected, right-click on any one of them. A context menu will appear. Simply navigate to Group -> Group.

Method 2: The Ribbon Menu

Alternatively, with your visuals selected, look at the top ribbon. Click on the Format tab. In the "Arrange" section of the ribbon, you'll see a Group dropdown. Click it and then select Group.

That’s it! Your selected visuals will now be bound together inside a single group box. You can now click on any visual in that group to select the entire group.

How to Ungroup Visuals

Just as easily as you created a group, you can dissolve one. Select the group, right-click on it, and choose Group -> Ungroup. You can also use the same 'Group' button on the Format ribbon and select 'Ungroup'. All the visuals will revert to being independent objects.

Best Practices & Advanced Techniques

Now that you know the basics, let's look at how to use groups like a pro to create truly polished and interactive reports.

Name Your Groups in the Selection Pane

This is arguably the most important habit to build. By default, your groups will be named "Group 1," "Group 2," and so on. This quickly becomes confusing. To save your future self a headache, immediately name your groups.

1. Go to the View tab in the ribbon.
2. Check the box next to Selection to open the Selection Pane (it usually opens on the right side of the screen).
3. The Selection Pane shows a list of all objects on your report page. Find your newly created group, double-click on its generic name, and give it a descriptive name like "Header KPIs" or "Sales Funnel Charts."

This simple act makes managing complex reports with many overlapping groups incredibly easier, especially when you start using bookmarks.

Use Bookmarks to Show and Hide Groups

This is where grouping transforms from a simple organizational tool into a driver of interactivity. The goal is to create different "views" on a single report page, which a user can toggle between using buttons. Imagine a page with one toggle for "Sales Overview" and another for "Marketing Performance."

Here’s the basic workflow:

1. Create and Name Your Groups: Create a group for your sales visuals (e.g., grp_Sales) and another for your marketing visuals (e.g., grp_Marketing). Make sure they are named properly in the Selection pane!
2. Open the Bookmarks Pane: Go to the View tab and enable the Bookmarks pane alongside your Selection pane.
3. Set Up Your First View (Bookmark 1): In the Selection pane, click the little eye icon next to your grp_Marketing group to hide it. Now, with only the sales visuals visible, click the "Add" button in the Bookmarks pane. Rename this new bookmark to "Sales View."
4. Set Up Your Second View (Bookmark 2): Now, reverse the visibility. Hide the grp_Sales group and show the grp_Marketing group. Click "Add" in the bookmarks pane again and name this one "Marketing View."
5. Add Buttons to Trigger the Bookmarks:

Now, when you (or your end users) click these buttons, Power BI will instantly hide one group of visuals and show the other. This allows you to pack an incredible amount of information into a single screen without overwhelming your audience.

Nest Your Groups for Complex Layouts

Remember that you can group items that are already grouped. For example, you might group a chart title (a text box) with its chart (a visual). You could then take that small group and group it with another chart-and-title group to create a larger "Comparison Charts" group. This nested structure provides an even greater level of control for arranging very complex report layouts.

Final Thoughts

Grouping visuals is a foundational skill in Power BI that pays huge dividends. It helps you tame complexity, align elements perfectly, and build cleaner, more professional-looking reports. When you combine grouping with the Selection Pane and Bookmarks, you unlock a new level of interactivity that can transform a static dashboard into a dynamic, app-like experience for your users.

While mastering these design features in Power BI is a valuable skill, we know that sometimes the goal isn't to spend hours designing the perfect report canvas - it's to get clear answers from your data, fast. We built Graphed to streamline that entire process. Instead of needing to manually add, align, and organize visuals for your sales and marketing data, you can simply describe the dashboard you want in plain English. Graphed connects your data sources and builds the live, interactive report for you in seconds, freeing you up to focus on strategy instead of report construction.