How to Make Power BI Dashboard Scrollable

Creating a Power BI dashboard that feels cramped or forces you to shrink visuals into unreadability is a common frustration. You can solve this by making your report page scrollable, giving you the space to present a clear, comprehensive story with your data. This tutorial will walk you through the exact steps to add both vertical and horizontal scrollbars to your Power BI dashboards.

Why Make a Power BI Dashboard Scrollable?

The standard 16:9 canvas in Power BI is great for an overview dashboard, but sometimes you have more to say. When you need to display a detailed breakdown, multiple charts, or a long table, you face a dilemma: cram everything onto one screen, making fonts and data points tiny, or split your report across multiple pages, which can disrupt the user's flow.

Making your dashboard scrollable is the perfect middle ground. It allows you to:

• Keep Visuals Readable: You can give each chart, graph, and table enough room to breathe, ensuring that labels are legible and insights are easy to spot.
• Present More Context: You aren’t limited by the screen's real estate. You can build a longer, more narrative report that guides the user through different layers of analysis, all on one cohesive page.
• Improve User Experience on Different Screens: A vertically scrolling report often adapts better to various monitor resolutions than a fixed one, preventing awkward scaling or cutoff visuals.

Imagine a marketing manager who needs to see campaign performance, website traffic sources, conversion rates, and a detailed list of recent leads. Instead of creating a cluttered overview or four separate pages, a single, scrollable dashboard can present this information in a logical, top-to-bottom flow.

First, Understand Power BI’s Key Settings

Before we jump into the steps, it's important to know the two sets of controls that make this possible: Canvas settings and Page view settings. These control the size of your report and how it's displayed.

Canvas Settings

This is where you define the actual dimensions of your report page. To access it, make sure no visual is selected by clicking on the blank background of your report, then go to the Format pane.

• Type: By default, this is set to a fixed aspect ratio like an HD screen (16:9) or a slideshow (4:3). The real power comes when you change this to Custom. This unlocks the ability to manually set the height and width of your canvas in pixels.
• Height & Width: When the type is set to Custom, you can enter any pixel value you want. To make a page vertically scrollable, you simply increase the height. To make it horizontally scrollable, you increase the width.

Page View Settings

This setting controls how Power BI scales your custom canvas to fit the user's screen. You can find this in the main ribbon under the View tab.

• Fit to page: This is the default. Power BI will shrink your entire canvas (no matter how big you made it) to fit whatever screen it's being viewed on. This setting will prevent scrolling.
• Fit to width: Power BI scales the canvas so its width perfectly matches the screen's width. If you’ve made your canvas taller than the screen, a vertical scrollbar will automatically appear. This is the key setting for vertical scrolling.
• Actual size: Power BI displays the canvas at its true pixel dimensions. If your custom canvas is wider or taller than the screen, both horizontal and vertical scrollbars will appear as needed.

Step-by-Step: Making Your Power BI Dashboard Vertically Scrollable

Let's create a "long-form" dashboard. This is perfect for detailed reports where viewers can scroll down to dig into the specifics after seeing a high-level summary at the top.

Step 1: Open Your Report and Select the Canvas

Start by opening your PBIX file in Power BI Desktop. Click on an empty area of the report page you want to make scrollable. This ensures the Format pane shows the settings for the page itself, not a specific visual.

Step 2: Access the Canvas Settings

In the Visualizations pane, click the Format your report page icon. Under the Canvas settings dropdown, you'll see the default settings.

Step 3: Change the Canvas Type to Custom and Increase the Height

Change the Type from '16:9' to Custom. The standard height for a 16:9 canvas is 720 pixels. To create scrolling room, change the Height to a larger value. A good starting point is 2160 pixels, which is three times the standard height. Don’t worry, you can always adjust this later.

• Width: 1280 px (keep standard)
• Height: 2160 px (increase substantially)

Step 4: Set the Page View to "Fit to Width"

This is the most crucial step. Go to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon. In the "Page view" section, select Fit to Width. Immediately, you'll see Power BI zoom in to make the page's width match your screen, and most importantly, a vertical scrollbar will appear on the right side of the canvas.

Step 5: Arrange Your Visuals on the Extended Canvas

Now the fun part begins. You can start dragging your visuals down into the newly accessible space. You have a long, vertical canvas to organize your report. Place summary cards and key KPIs at the top ("above the fold"), and arrange more detailed charts and tables for users to discover as they scroll down.

Bonus: Making Your Dashboard Horizontally Scrollable

While vertical scrolling is more common, horizontal scrolling can be useful for certain types of data, such as timelines, project plans with Gantt charts, or wide tables. The process is very similar but with one key difference in the page view setting.

Step 1: Set Canvas Type to Custom and Increase the Width

Just like before, select the canvas and go to Format > Canvas settings. Change the Type to Custom. This time, leave the Height at its default (e.g., 720 px) and increase the Width significantly. For example, change it to 2560 px (twice the standard width).

• Width: 2560 px (increase substantially)
• Height: 720 px (keep standard)

Step 2: Change the Page View to "Actual Size"

Go to the View tab and change the Page view to Actual Size. Because your canvas is now wider than your screen can display at 100% scale, a horizontal scrollbar will appear at the bottom. The "Fit to Width" setting won't work here, as its purpose is to eliminate horizontal scrolling.

Best Practices for Designing Scrollable Dashboards

Simply making a dashboard scrollable doesn't automatically make it good. To create reports that are both functional and delightful, keep these design tips in mind.

• Place Key Info Above the Fold: Your users should understand the dashboard's main purpose without having to scroll at all. Position your most important KPIs, scorecards, and a title at the very top.
• Create a Logical Flow: Design the layout to tell a story or answer questions in a logical sequence. Start with a high-level overview and let the user scroll down for more granular details, breakdowns, or related metrics.
• Use Spacing and Headers: Use white space generously to prevent your report from feeling cluttered. Add text boxes with clear headers (e.g., "Web Traffic Analysis," "Sales Team Performance") to break your report into distinct sections as the user scrolls.
• Optimize Performance: Be mindful that a huge canvas filled with dozens of complex visuals can slow down loading times. Ensure your data model is optimized, use the Performance Analyzer to identify slow visuals, and avoid overly complex DAX measures when possible.
• Design for Mobile Separately: A long, scrolling dashboard designed for a desktop will not look good on a phone. Use Power BI’s "Mobile layout" feature to create a separate, optimized view specifically for small screens.

Final Thoughts

Mastering scrollable dashboards unlocks a new level of flexibility in your report design. By simply adjusting the canvas dimensions and page view settings, you can break free from the constraints of fixed-size reports and create rich, detailed narratives that are comprehensive without sacrificing clarity.

While Power BI is a powerful tool, you know that building reports and dashboards from scratch can be a time-consuming process full of clicks, adjustments, and learning curves. We designed Graphed to remove this friction entirely. Instead of configuring canvas settings and arranging visuals manually, you can simply describe the dashboard you want to see - "Show me a report of sales vs. marketing spend by campaign this quarter" - and our AI builds the interactive report for you in seconds, with your data sources all connected in real-time.