How to Make Power BI Tables Look Good

A standard Power BI table is functional, but it rarely grabs attention or tells a clear story on its own. If you're tired of default tables that look cluttered and confusing, you've come to the right place. This guide will walk you through a series of practical formatting techniques to transform your data tables from bland spreadsheets into clear, professional, and insightful visuals.

Why Bother Formatting Your Tables?

You might wonder if spending time on table design is really worth it. The answer is a definitive yes. Good formatting is not just about making things look pretty, it's about making your data accessible and easy to understand. A well-designed table guides your audience's eye to the most important information, helping them spot trends, identify outliers, and grasp key takeaways in seconds.

Think of it as the difference between a dense block of text and a well-structured document with headings, bullet points, and highlighted text. One is a chore to get through, while the other is easy to scan and digest. By improving your table's design, you improve its effectiveness as a communication tool.

Starting with the Basics: The "Format your visual" Pane

Before diving into complex rules, let's cover the foundational formatting options available in the "Format your visual" tab (the paintbrush icon) of the Visualizations pane in Power BI. These settings are the building blocks of a better-looking table.

1. Choose a Style Preset

Power BI offers several built-in table styles that can give you a quick and clean starting point. You can find these under Visual > Style presets.

• Minimal: A clean look with very few lines. Great for embedding in minimalistic reports.
• Bold header: Makes the column titles stand out, which helps with readability.
• Alternating rows: Shades every other row, making it easier for the eye to track data across a wide table. This is often a go-to for improving readability immediately.
• Contrasting alternating rows: A more high-contrast version of the above.

Pick one that fits the overall theme of your dashboard. "Alternating rows" is often the most practical and user-friendly choice.

2. Adjust Grids and Borders

Under the Grid section, you can control the visibility and appearance of vertical and horizontal gridlines. Sometimes, less is more. Turning off vertical gridlines and using a light gray for horizontal gridlines can make the table feel less cluttered while still separating the rows clearly.

You can also use the Border option to put a border around the entire visual, helping it stand out against the report background.

3. Manage Column Headers and Values

Don't just accept the default fonts and sizes. In the Column headers section, you can:

• Increase the font size to make titles more prominent.
• Apply bold formatting.
• Change the text and background color to align with your company's branding or your report's color scheme.
• Ensure text wrapping is enabled for long column titles to avoid them getting cut off.

Similarly, the Values section lets you control the formatting for the data itself. A key tip here is to use the Row padding option to add a little more vertical space between rows, which significantly improves readability.

4. Text Alignment is Crucial

By default, Power BI may not align text and numbers optimally. Proper alignment is a subtle detail that has a big impact on professionalism.

• Text: Always align text to the left. This is the natural way we read.
• Numbers: Always align numbers to the right. This aligns the decimal points (whether visible or not) and makes it much easier to compare values of different magnitudes. A column of numbers with 10, 100, and 1,000 is much easier to scan when right-aligned.

You can set this in the Specific column dropdown within the formatting pane. Select the column you want to format and adjust its alignment accordingly.

Conditional Formatting: Making Your Data Tell a Story

This is where your table truly comes to life. Conditional formatting changes a cell's appearance - like its background color, font color, or visual element - based on its value. It's the single most powerful tool for making tables look great and communicate information effectively.

To access it, right-click on a field in the "Columns" well of the Visualizations pane and select Conditional formatting. Let’s look at the most useful options.

Background Color Scales (Heatmaps)

A background color scale shades cells based on their value, creating a heatmap effect. This is perfect for instantly identifying high and low points in your data.

Example: In a sales table, you could apply a color scale to the 'Revenue' column. You might set the lowest values to a light yellow and the highest values to a dark green. Anyone looking at the table can immediately see which products or regions are generating the most revenue without reading a single number.

How to do it:

1. Right-click the numeric field (e.g., 'Revenue') and select Conditional formatting > Background color.
2. In the dialog box, ensure the Format style is set to Gradient.
3. Define your colors for the minimum and maximum values. Consider adding a diverging color for the center value if it makes sense for your data (e.g., for positive and negative values).

Data Bars

Data bars add small bar charts inside your table cells, making it incredibly easy to compare the relative size of different values at a glance. They offer a great visual punch without taking up extra space.

Example: In a table showing website traffic by source, you could add data bars to the 'Sessions' column. This allows you to quickly see which source is driving the most traffic, even in a long list.

How to do it:

1. Right-click the numeric field (e.g., 'Sessions') and select Conditional formatting > Data bars.
2. You can set the colors for the positive and negative bars, and choose the direction.
3. For a cleaner look, click the "Show bar only" checkbox. This will hide the number and display just the visual bar, which is great for columns where the exact value is less important than its relative size.

Icons

Icons, like traffic lights, arrows, or checkmarks, can be used to represent the status of a specific metric based on predefined rules. This is ideal for KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) where you want to show if a value is on track, at risk, or has missed its target.

Example: You could have a 'Profit Margin %' column. You could set a rule to show:

• A green up arrow if the margin is > 25%.
• A yellow sideways arrow if the margin is between 10% and 25%.
• A red down arrow if the margin is < 10%.

How to do it:

1. Right-click the field and select Conditional formatting > Icons.
2. Choose an icon set from the Icon layout dropdown.
3. Define your rules in the Rules section. You set conditions (e.g., "if value is greater than... and less than...") and assign an icon to each condition.

Putting It All Together: A Before-and-After Example

Let's walk through transforming a basic, unformatted table into a polished, insightful visual.

Our starting point (The "Before"): A default Power BI table showing sales data by product category. It's just a raw dump of numbers - functional, but hard to interpret quickly.

Here’s the plan to make it look great:

1. Apply a Clean Style: We’ll start by going to Format your visual > Style presets and selecting "Alternating rows" to help distinguish one row from the next across long tables.
2. Improve the Headers: We'll navigate to Column headers, make the text bold, increase the font size slightly, and perhaps give it a subtle background color that matches our report’s theme.
3. Fix Alignment: In the Specific column options, we'll select our 'Product Category' column and set its alignment to left. Then, we’ll select our numeric columns like 'Units Sold,' 'Revenue,' and 'Profit Margin' and set their alignment to right.
4. Add a Heatmap for Revenue: We’ll right-click the 'Revenue' field, choose Conditional formatting > Background color, and set up a light-to-dark green gradient. Now, our highest revenue categories will pop out immediately.
5. Visualize Units Sold with Data Bars: We’ll right-click the 'Units Sold' field, choose Conditional formatting > Data bars, and pick a simple color. This gives us an instant visual comparison of volume across categories.
6. Use Icons for Profit Margin Status: Finally, we'll right-click 'Profit Margin', select Conditional formatting > Icons, and set up rules to display a green circle for high margins, a yellow triangle for average margins, and a red diamond for low margins.

The result (The "After"): Our table is now a high-impact visual. Without reading any numbers, we can instantly see which product categories generate the most revenue (darkest green cells), which sell in the highest volume (longest data bars), and which have the healthiest profit margins (green circles). The information is now accessible, clear, and actionable.

Final Thoughts

Transforming a Power BI table from a simple grid into a powerful analytical tool is all about thoughtful formatting choices. By starting with a clean style, ensuring proper alignment, and leveraging conditional formatting like heatmaps, data bars, and icons, you can guide your audience to key insights much more effectively.

Of course, building dashboards and endlessly tweaking formatting presets in tools like Power BI can be time-consuming. At Graphed, we’ve taken a different approach. We built a tool that lets you connect your data sources and create real-time reports and dashboards just by describing what you want in plain English. Instead of hunting through formatting panes, you could simply ask, "create a table showing revenue by product category with a heatmap on revenue," and our AI data analyst builds it for you in seconds, automatically applying best practices for clarity and design along the way.