How to Make Power BI Look Good

A powerful Power BI dashboard that helps no one is just a collection of colorful charts. If your reports are cluttered, confusing, or just plain ugly, your audience will tune out before they ever get to the valuable insights you've uncovered. This tutorial will walk you through actionable principles and practical steps to transform your chaotic Power BI reports into clean, professional, and visually appealing dashboards that people actually want to use.

Start With Your "Why": The Planning Phase

Before you drag a single visual onto the canvas, the most critical step is to plan. A great design isn't about random artistic flair, it's about purpose. Thinking through the strategy first will save you countless hours of redesigns later.

Who is this for?

Your audience dictates everything. Are you building a high-level overview for a C-suite executive or a detailed, granular report for a marketing campaign manager? An executive likely needs a few top-level KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) displayed clearly, allowing them to grasp the company's health in 30 seconds. A campaign manager, on the other hand, needs to slice and dice data, so their dashboard might require more filters and detailed charts.

Ask yourself:

• What is their level of data literacy? Avoid unnecessary jargon or overly complex charts for non-technical audiences.
• What are their primary goals and responsibilities? Your dashboard should help them do their job better.
• How will they view this dashboard? A report designed for a large monitor won't look good on a mobile phone without some adjustments. Power BI's mobile layout view can help with this.

What decision should this dashboard drive?

A good dashboard answers questions and drives action. Don't just show data, tell a story. Identify the single most important message you want to convey. Is it "Our new marketing campaign is driving more sales than the old one"? Or "Our North American sales team is underperforming"? Every element on your dashboard - every chart, number, and title - should support this central message. If it doesn't, it's just noise and should be removed.

Master Your Layout: Creating Structure and Flow

A messy layout is the fastest way to overwhelm your user. A well-organized structure guides their eyes naturally through the information, making it easy to understand and digest.

Use a Grid and Align Everything

The human brain loves order and pattern. Misaligned elements create a subtle, subconscious sense of chaos. Turn on the gridlines and snap-to-grid features in Power BI (View > Gridlines > Snap objects to grid) to ensure every chart, title, and card is perfectly aligned. Create clear vertical and horizontal "lanes" for your visuals. This single change can instantly make a dashboard feel more professional and put-together.

Embrace Whitespace

New designers often feel the need to fill every single pixel of the screen. Resist this urge. Whitespace, or negative space, is the empty area around your visuals. It's not wasted space - it's an active design element that reduces clutter and improves readability. Adding padding between charts and leaving margins around the edges of your report gives the user's eyes a place to rest, making the data points you <em>do</em> show stand out even more.

Follow the Z-Pattern

People in Western cultures tend to read screens in a "Z" pattern. They start at the top-left, scan across to the top-right, go diagonally down to the bottom-left, and then scan across to the bottom-right. Use this to your advantage:

• Top-Left Corner: Place your most important KPI or summary here. This is the first thing your audience will see.
• Top Row: Use this for high-level numbers, cards, and key filters.
• Middle (Diagonal): Fill this space with your main charts and graphs that support the top-level numbers.
• Bottom-Right Corner: This is a good spot for more detailed, granular data, like tables, that users can look at last.

Color Theory in Action

Color is a powerful tool for communication. Used correctly, it adds clarity and draws attention. Used poorly, it creates confusion and visual noise.

Ditch the Defaults and Create a Palette

Power BI's default color theme is a dead giveaway of a beginner's dashboard. Create a custom theme that reflects your company's branding. This not only looks more professional but also builds trust. Limit your palette to a few key colors. A good rule of thumb is the 60-30-10 rule:

• 60% Primary/Neutral Color: Use this for backgrounds and main structural elements. Think light gray, off-white, or a faded brand color.
• 30% Secondary Color: This should be your main data color, used in charts to represent the primary metric.
• 10% Accent Color: This is a bold, contrasting color used sparingly to highlight a critical insight or call-to-action. Want to point out a shockingly low conversion rate? This is the color for it.

You can use free tools like Coolors or Adobe Color to help you generate a professional palette. Once you have your colors, you can import a custom JSON theme file into Power BI to apply it across your entire report.

Use Color with Purpose, Not for Decoration

Every color should mean something. Avoid using different colors for different categories in a bar chart unless the colors themselves represent something (e.g., green for 'Good', red for 'Bad'). Using a rainbow of colors for the months of the year adds no value and only creates visual noise. Instead, use a single color for the bars and leverage your accent color to highlight the most important category.

Choosing the Right Visual for the Job

The type of chart you choose can make your data either instantly understandable or completely misleading. The goal isn't variety, it's clarity.

A Quick Chart Selection Guide:

• Bar/Column Charts: The hero of data visualization. Perfect for comparing categories. Use a horizontal bar chart if your category labels are long.
• Line Charts: The best choice for showing trends over time (e.g., daily sales, monthly website traffic).
• Scatter Plots: Great for showing the relationship between two different numerical variables.
• Tables/Matrices: Use when you need to show precise values or have multiple units of measure. Keep them small and add conditional formatting (like data bars or color scales) to make them scannable.
• Cards: Perfect for showing a single, critical number (e.g., Total Revenue, Number of Users). Use them sparingly for your top KPIs.
• The Chart to Almost Always Avoid: The Pie Chart. While familiar, pie charts and donut charts are difficult for the brain to interpret accurately. It's hard to compare the size of different slices, especially when they are close in value. A simple bar chart is almost always a better, clearer option.

Simplify and Declutter Your Visuals

Once you've chosen your chart, strip it of anything that isn’t essential. In Power BI's "Format visual" pane:

• Remove chart borders.
• Mute or remove gridlines.
• Use direct data labels instead of relying on a Y-axis, if possible.
• Ensure titles are clear and descriptive (e.g., "Monthly Revenue Trend" is better than "Sum of Revenue").
• Don't use busy background images that compete with your data. A simple, solid background is best.

Typography That Clicks

Text is a core part of your dashboard design. Good typography makes your numbers and titles easy to read, while bad typography can make the whole report feel sloppy.

Establish a Clear Hierarchy

Use size, weight (bold vs. regular), and color to signal the importance of different text elements. Your main dashboard title should be the largest and boldest. Chart titles should be smaller, and axis labels or body text smaller still. Being consistent with this hierarchy across the entire report makes it significantly easier to scan.

Keep it Simple

Stick to one, or at most two, font families for the entire dashboard. A clean, sans-serif font like Segoe UI (Power BI's default), Arial, or Helvetica is usually a safe and highly readable choice. Avoid decorative or script fonts that are hard to read at small sizes.

Final Thoughts

Transforming your Power BI dashboards from cluttered and confusing to clean and impactful isn't about being a graphic design wizard. It's about following a few foundational principles: plan with your audience in mind, create a clear structure, use color purposefully, choose the right visuals, and pay attention to the details. By applying these techniques, you can create reports that not only look good but also drive smarter, data-informed decisions.

Tools like Power BI are incredibly powerful, but their learning curve can be steep, especially when it comes to design. The hours spent tweaking alignments, importing themes, and learning DAX can be draining. At Graphed we handle all of that for you. We built our platform because we believe getting insights shouldn't require an 80-hour certification course. Just connect your data sources, describe the dashboard you want in plain English, and our AI instantly creates clean, professional, real-time reports so you can get back to acting on your data, not just wrestling with it.