How to Make Power BI Visuals Look Better

Building a dashboard in Power BI is a huge step, but getting it to look 'just right' is often the final, frustrating hurdle. You've wrangled the data and chosen your charts, but the result feels more like a cluttered spreadsheet than a clear, professional report. This guide will walk you through practical, easy-to-implement design principles to transform your Power BI visuals from messy to impressive, making them easier for anyone to understand and use.

Start with a Solid Foundation: Layout and Structure

Before you even think about colors or fonts, your dashboard's layout needs a plan. Good design guides the user's eye and tells a story with data. A messy layout just creates confusion.

Think Like a Newspaper

Readers naturally start in the top-left corner of a page and work their way down and to the right. Apply this same logic to your dashboard. Place your most important, high-level KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and summary visuals in that top-left quadrant. These are the numbers people need to see at a glance - like total revenue, overall conversion rate, or top-line sales figures.

As you move down and to the right, provide more detailed breakdowns and supporting visuals. For example:

• Top-Left: A card visual showing "Total Sales This Quarter: $5.2M".
• Middle: A bar chart breaking down "Sales by Region".
• Bottom-Right: A detailed table showing "Sales Performance by Individual Rep".

This structure creates a natural flow of information, from a broad overview to specific details, making the report much more intuitive to follow.

Alignment is Your Best Friend

Nothing screams "amateur design" like visuals that are misaligned. A clean, organized dashboard relies on a grid structure. Power BI makes this easy to manage if you know where to look.

Go to the View tab in Power BI Desktop and check the boxes for Show gridlines and Snap objects to grid. This will give you visible guides to help line everything up perfectly. Ensure the tops and bottoms of visuals in the same row are aligned, and the sides of visuals in the same column are also aligned. Even a few pixels of misalignment can make the entire report feel sloppy and distracting.

Don't Fear the White Space

It's tempting to cram as many visuals onto one page as possible, but this is a common mistake. White space, or negative space, is the empty area around your visuals, and it's essential for readability. It gives your charts and numbers room to breathe, reducing cognitive load for the viewer and helping them focus on what's important.

Instead of packing everything onto a single page, consider using buttons and bookmarks to create different views or "pages" within your report. This allows you to maintain a clean, uncluttered interface while still providing access to deeper levels of data.

Choose Your Colors Wisely: Themes and Palettes

Color is one of the most powerful tools for making a report look professional, but it's also the easiest to get wrong. Used correctly, color helps highlight insights, used poorly, it just creates noise.

Ditch the Default Theme

The standard Power BI color themes are decent, but they're overused. To make your report stand out and feel professional, use a custom theme. The easiest way to do this is to align the report with your company's branding.

You can create a custom theme by going to the View tab, clicking the dropdown arrow in the Themes section, and selecting Customize current theme. Here, you can define a custom color palette, set default fonts, and change properties for your visuals.

This not only makes your report look more polished but also ensures visual consistency with other company materials, like presentations and websites.

Color with Purpose

Avoid using colors simply for decoration. Every color choice should have a purpose. Here are a few ways to use color effectively:

• Categorical Colors: When showing different categories (like product lines or regions), use distinct but complementary colors from your palette. Try not to use more than 5-7 different colors in a single chart, as it becomes visually overwhelming.
• Sequential Colors: Use a gradient of a single color to show a range of values, from low to high. This is perfect for heatmaps or shading states on a map based on sales volume.
• Diverging Colors: Use a two-color gradient with a neutral midpoint to show values that diverge from a central point (like profit and loss). For example, red for negative, white for zero, and blue for positive.
• Highlighting: Use a neutral color (like grey) for most of your data points and a single, bright accent color to draw attention to a specific point of interest, like a top-performing campaign or this month's data.

Fine-Tune the Details: Formatting Individual Visuals

Great design lies in the details. Spending a few extra minutes formatting each visual can make a world of difference in clarity and professionalism.

Simplify Your Titles, Axes, and Labels

Visual clutter, often called "chart junk," distracts from the data's message. Scrutinize every element on your chart and ask: "Is this absolutely necessary?"

• Titles: Make chart titles descriptive and statement-oriented. Instead of "Sales by Month," try "Monthly Sales Trend Shows 15% Growth in Q3." It immediately tells the user what they're looking at and what the key insight is.
• Axes: Remove redundant axis titles. If your chart title is "Monthly Sales Trend," you don't need to title the X-axis "Month." You can also often turn off axes entirely and use direct data labels on the chart itself. This puts the values right next to the data points, making them easier to read.
• Gridlines: Mute your gridlines. Instead of solid black, make them a light shade of grey or even dashed lines. They should be just visible enough to guide the eye without competing with the data.

Focus on Readable Fonts

Consistency and readability are key when it comes to fonts. A jumble of different font styles and sizes looks chaotic.

• Stick to One Family: Choose one clean, sans-serif font family (like Segoe UI, Arial, or Helvetica) for the entire report. These fonts are easy to read on-screen.
• Create Hierarchy: Use size and weight (bold, regular) to create a clear visual hierarchy. Your main report title should be the largest, visual titles should be smaller, and axis labels and data labels should be the smallest. A consistent structure helps users navigate the information.

Enhance Usability with Interactive Elements

A beautiful dashboard is nice, but a beautiful and usable dashboard is game-changing. Power BI's interactive features can elevate your report from a static image to a dynamic analysis tool.

Use Slicers Thoughtfully

Slicers are great for allowing users to filter the data, but too many can clutter the report page. Group related filters together and use the dropdown slicer style instead of the list style to save space. For date ranges, the "relative date" slicer (e.g., "Last 30 days," "This Quarter") is incredibly user-friendly.

Add Context with Custom Tooltips

Tooltips - the little information boxes that appear when you hover over a data point - are one of Power BI's most powerful features. Instead of relying on the default tooltip, you can create a custom one.

To do this, create a new report page and, in the Format pane under Page information, turn on Allow use as a tooltip. Then design this small page with extra charts or data points. For example, if your main chart shows sales by country, your tooltip could show a mini-chart of sales by product line for that specific country. This provides rich, contextual information without ever cluttering the main view.

Your Quick Design Checklist

Feeling overwhelmed? Keep this checklist handy as you build or review your next Power BI report.

• Layout: Is the most important information at the top-left? Are all visuals aligned to a grid?
• Spacing: Is there enough white space, or do the visuals feel crammed together?
• Color: Are you using a consistent, purposeful color theme? Does it align with your brand?
• Text: Are your titles clear and descriptive? Is the font choice simple, readable, and consistent?
• Clutter: Have you removed all unnecessary elements like redundant labels, harsh gridlines, and borders?
• Interactivity: Are filters intuitive? Do tooltips add valuable context?

Final Thoughts

Transforming a Power BI report from a data-dump into an intuitive dashboard is all about being intentional. By focusing on principles like clean layouts, strategic color use, and clear formatting, you can create reports that not only look professional but are also much easier for your team to understand and act on.

While these tips can dramatically improve your reports, we built Graphed because we believe getting clear insights shouldn't require you to become a part-time report designer. We use natural language to instantly generate clean, professional dashboards from all your marketing and sales data sources. Just describe the report you need, and our AI handles the entire process - from pulling live data to creating beautiful, easy-to-understand visuals in seconds. If you're ready to skip the formatting grind and get straight to the answers, sign up for free and try Graphed.