How to Open Format Pane in Power BI

Customizing your visuals is how you turn a basic Power BI report into a polished, professional dashboard that tells a clear story. The key to this transformation is the Format pane, but with recent user interface updates, finding it can sometimes feel like a game of hide-and-seek. This guide will show you exactly how to find, open, and effectively use the Format pane to make your data visualizations look exactly how you want them.

What is the Power BI Format Pane?

The Format pane is the control center for the appearance of your visuals in Power BI. Simply put, any time you want to change how a chart, table, or slicer looks - from its colors and fonts to its title and background - you’ll do it in the Format pane.

Without formatting, all your visuals will use Power BI's default settings. While functional, default styles rarely align with company branding or the specific story you’re trying to tell with your data. The Format pane is where you take command and apply your unique design choices.

You can use it to modify nearly every aesthetic aspect of a visual, including:

• Chart titles, fonts, sizes, and colors
• X and Y-axis labels, scales, and line weights
• Data labels (showing the values on bars or points)
• Colors of bars, lines, map areas, and pie slices
• Background colors, borders, and shadows
• Legend position and style
• Conditional formatting to change color based on data rules

Mastering this pane is non-negotiable for anyone who wants to build impressive and easy-to-understand reports. Let's get into how to find and use it.

How to Open the Format Pane in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

In the latest versions of Power BI Desktop, the layout has been streamlined. The old cluster of panes on the right side has been organized into a more logical workflow. Finding the Format pane is simple once you know the one crucial first step.

Step 1: Select a Visual on Your Report Canvas

This is the most important step and the one that trips up most new users. The Format pane is contextual, meaning its options change depending on what you have selected. If you haven't clicked on a visual, Power BI doesn't know what you want to format.

Click on any visual on your report canvas - a bar chart, a slicer, a card, anything. You'll see a bounding box appear around it, confirming it's selected.

Step 2: Locate the Visualizations Pane

With your visual selected, look to the right side of your Power BI window. You will see several panes stacked there, typically including "Data," "Visualizations," and "Filters." We're interested in the "Visualizations" pane.

Step 3: Click the "Format your visual" Icon (the Paintbrush)

At the top of the "Visualizations" pane, you’ll see a couple of icons. They generally look like this:

• Build a visual (a bar chart icon): This is where you add data fields to your visual (e.g., placing sales data on the Y-axis and date data on the X-axis).
• Format your visual (a paintbrush on a chart icon): This is your gateway to the Format pane.

Click the paintbrush icon. Voila! The pane will switch from data-field settings to formatting options, and you are now in the Format pane.

Navigating the Modern Format Pane: "Visual" vs. "General" Tabs

Once you open the Format pane, you'll see it’s divided into two main categories at the top: Visual and General. This separation is designed to make finding settings more intuitive.

The "Visual" Tab

This tab contains formatting options that are specific to the type of visual you've selected. In other words, the settings here will change depending on whether you've selected a bar chart, a line chart, a map, or a table.

For example:

• If you select a bar chart, the Visual tab will show options for "Columns," "X-axis," "Y-axis," and "Data labels." You'd come here to change the color of the bars or adjust the font size on the axis labels.
• If you select a line chart, the Visual tab will have settings for "Lines" (where you can change the style or thickness), "Markers" (to customize the dots on the line), and "Gridlines."
• If you select a pie chart, you'll see options for "Slices," "Legend," and "Detail labels."

Think of the "Visual" tab as the place to style the core components that make up that specific chart type.

The "General" Tab

The "General" tab contains a set of universal formatting options that apply to any visual, regardless of its type. These settings control the overall visual container and its properties.

Here are the most common options you'll find under the "General" tab:

• Title: This is where you can turn on the visual's title, write the title text, and change its font, size, color, and alignment.
• Effects: This section lets you control the visual's container. You can add a background color, adjust transparency, add a border, or even apply a subtle shadow to make the visual "pop" off the page.
• Header icons: Control the visibility of the small icons (like filter, focus mode) that appear when you hover over the visual in the published report.
• Properties: This contains information about the visual's size and position on the canvas. You can lock its aspect ratio here.
• Alt Text: For accessibility, you can add a description of the visual for screen readers.

In short: use the Visual tab for chart-specific parts (like bars and lines) and the General tab for the title and frame around the chart.

Troubleshooting: What to Do If You Can't Find the Format Pane

Sometimes the pane might seem to have disappeared entirely. Here are the most common reasons and their simple fixes.

1. You Haven't Selected a Visual: As mentioned, this is the #1 reason. If no visual is selected, the Format pane remains hidden. Just click on any element on your report page, and it should reappear.
2. The Right-Side Panes are Collapsed or Closed: It's possible to accidentally close the entire pane group on the right. To get it back, go to the View tab in the main ribbon at the top of the Power BI window. In the "Show panes" section, make sure that Format is checked. This will make the pane reappear. You can also check "Visualizations," "Data," and "Filters" here if any of them are missing.
3. Power BI Updates: "On-Object" Interaction is Enabled: Microsoft is constantly pushing updates, and a major new feature is "On-Object Interaction." With this feature enabled, formatting buttons appear directly on the visual itself when you select it, rather than requiring you to go to the pane on the right. If you see editing buttons appearing a-la-carte next to your chart's title or axes, this feature is likely on.

By checking these three things, you'll be able to find the Format pane 99% of the time.

Productivity Tips for Working in the Format Pane

Just knowing where the pane is gets you started, but these efficiency tips will save you hours of clicking in the long run.

1. Use the Search Bar

The Format pane contains dozens of settings, nested within multiple drop-down menus. Instead of hunting for a specific setting, use the search bar at the very top of the pane. Need to change the font color of the data labels? Just type "color" into the search box, and all color-related properties will be filtered for you. This is an incredible time-saver.

2. Apply Consistent Formatting with Format Painter

If you've spent five minutes styling a bar chart perfectly - getting the title font, axis labels, and bar colors just right - you don't need to repeat that process for every other visual. Use the Format Painter.

• Select your perfectly styled visual.
• Go to the Home tab in the main ribbon and click Format Painter (it has a paintbrush icon).
• Your cursor will change to include a paintbrush. Now, click on the unstyled visual you want to update.

Power BI will instantly copy all applicable formatting from the first visual to the second. This is the fastest way to create a consistent look and feel across your entire report.

3. Set a Custom Theme For Your Report

Constantly changing visual colors and fonts to match your company's branding? Save yourself the effort by setting a report theme. Go to the View tab and click the dropdown arrow in the "Themes" section. You can choose a pre-built theme or click "Customize current theme."

Here, you can set default colors, fonts, font sizes, and page backgrounds. Once you set a theme, every new visual you create will automatically adopt those styles, dramatically reducing the amount of manual formatting you need to do.

Final Thoughts

The Format pane is the heart of visual customization in Power BI. By first selecting a visual and then clicking the paintbrush icon in the Visualizations pane, you unlock complete control over your report's design. Getting comfortable with flipping between the "Visual" and "General" tabs will quickly elevate your dashboards from simple to spectacular.

Building high-quality dashboards often involves hours spent toggling between menus, tweaking settings, and wrangling different data sources like Shopify, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. Here at Graphed, we found that process slow and counterintuitive. We've built an AI data analyst that lets you create real-time reports and dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English. This eliminates the endless clicking in formatting menus and allows you to move directly from data to insights in seconds, not hours.