How to Remove Scroll Bar in Power BI

An unexpected scroll bar can disrupt an otherwise perfect Power BI visual, making your report look cluttered and less professional. If you've ever built a chart or table only to find a scroll bar appeared where you didn't want one, you know how frustrating this can be. This tutorial will walk you through exactly why this happens and provide several practical, step-by-step methods to remove those scroll bars for a cleaner user experience.

Why Do Scroll Bars Appear in Power BI?

Before we can fix the problem, it helps to understand the cause. A scroll bar appears in a Power BI visual for one simple reason: the content is larger than its container. Think of any visual on your report canvas - a bar chart, a table, a slicer - as a box. When the data or elements you put inside that box (like chart axes, table rows, or list items) take up more space than the box allows, Power BI automatically adds a scroll bar so you can see the rest of the content.

This can happen in a few common scenarios:

• Too many categories: A bar or column chart trying to display 50 different product categories on its axis will likely run out of space.
• Lengthy text labels: Long product names or descriptions in an axis or table can force content to overflow.
• High data volume: A table or matrix visual with more rows than can be displayed in the given height will need a vertical scroll bar.
• Small visual size: You've simply made the visual's container too small on the report canvas to accommodate its contents.

The solution isn't usually just one magical "hide scroll bar" button. Instead, it’s about strategically adjusting either the content or the container to make everything fit comfortably.

Methods for Removing Scroll Bars

Here are the most effective ways to reclaim your canvas and get rid of unwanted scroll bars, broken down by an approach you can follow for just about any situation.

1. Simple Resizing and Formatting

The most direct approach is often to adjust the size and spacing of your visual's elements. These tweaks are all made within the Format your visual pane (the paintbrush icon) in Power BI Desktop.

Increasing the Visual's Container Size

Before diving into detailed formatting, try the simplest fix: make the visual itself larger. Click on the visual you want to edit and drag its corners or edges on the report canvas to expand its height or width. Often, giving the content just a little more room to breathe is enough to make the scroll bar disappear, especially with tables or charts that are just barely overflowing.

Reducing Font Size and Padding

If resizing the entire visual isn't an option, you can make the content inside it smaller. Look for formatting options that control text size and spacing.

• For Tables and Matrices: Navigate to Format visual > Grid. Here you can adjust Padding. Reducing it from the default packs your rows closer together. You can also decrease the font size under Values and Column headers to fit more data.
• For Bar/Column Charts: The axis labels are often the culprit. Go to Y-Axis (for bar charts) or X-Axis (for column charts) and reduce the font size under Values.
• For Slicers: For list-style slicers, select the visual, go to Format visual > Slicer settings > Values, and adjust the font size.

Managing Category Labels on Chart Axes

For bar and column charts, the axis with your category labels can quickly become crowded. Power BI gives you specific controls for this.

Select your chart, go to the Format visual pane, and find the settings for the crowded axis (usually the Y-Axis for bar charts).

• In the Y-Axis card, expand the options and look for a setting called Maximum category width. By increasing the percentage value here, you allow more horizontal space for your labels, which can sometimes remove the need for a vertical scroll on the main plot area of the visual.

2. Filtering Your Data Strategically

Resizing and formatting can only get you so far. One of the best ways to eliminate a scroll bar is to reduce the amount of data the visual needs to display. It also leads to clearer, more effective dashboards - viewers rarely find a chart with 100 bars to be insightful.

Using a "Top N" Filter

Instead of showing every single category, why not focus on the most important ones? The "Top N" filter is perfect for this.

1. Select the visual you want to modify.
2. Open the Filters pane.
3. You'll see the fields used in the visual. Drag the field that's causing the crowding (e.g., "Product Name") into the "Filters on this visual" section if it's not already there.
4. Expand that field's card and change the Filter type from "Basic filtering" to "Top N".
5. Configure the filter:
6. Click Apply filter.

Your visual will refresh to show only the Top 10 categories, immediately decluttering the axis and almost certainly removing the scroll bar.

3. Changing the Visual or Component Type

Sometimes the problem isn't the data, but the way you're choosing to display it. If resizing and filtering aren't working or aren't a good fit for your use case, consider if a different presentation style would solve the issue.

Change Slicer Style from List to Dropdown

A list-style slicer is one of the most common causes of unwanted scroll bars. When you have a field with dozens or hundreds of possible values (like a list of customers or territories), displaying them all as a list takes up a huge amount of vertical space.

The fix is simple:

1. Select the slicer.
2. With the slicer selected, click the tiny down-arrow in the header of the Format visual pane.
3. In the Slicer settings > Options > Style dropdown, change the selection from Vertical list to Dropdown.

Your slicer will collapse into a single line, completely removing the scroll bar. This saves a massive amount of canvas space and provides a much cleaner user experience.

Consider a Matrix with Drill-Down Instead of a Cluttered Bar Chart

If you have hierarchical data (e.g., Category > Subcategory > Product), putting every level on a single bar chart axis will create a bloated visual. A better approach is to use a Matrix visual. You can add the hierarchical fields to the "Rows" bucket of data and enable drill-down capabilities, allowing users to explore the data step-by-step rather than seeing everything at once.

4. Check Your Canvas and Page View Settings

If you're seeing a scroll bar for the entire report page rather than an individual visual, the problem likely lies with your page settings.

Go to the View tab on the Power BI Desktop ribbon. Look for the Page view section. Here you will find three options:

• Fit to page: This is the default and usually the best option. It scales your report to fit the viewer's screen without scrolling.
• Fit to width: This scales the report to fit width-wise but may introduce a vertical scroll bar if your content is taller than the browser window.
• Actual size: This displays your canvas' dimensions as pixel-for-pixel values. Unless your screen has higher pixel resolution than the actual designed canvas size, it will definitely show a scroll bar as soon as your content size becomes bigger than your screen size.

To prevent page-level scrolling, design your report with Fit to page selected from the start. Also, double-check your canvas dimensions by deselecting all the visuals, go to Format your report page > Canvas settings, and ensure that it's the size you want - 16:9 is now a standard ratio for widescreen screens and TV sets, for example.

Best Practices to Avoid Unwanted Scroll Bars

Prevention is always better than cure. Keep these tips in mind to simplify your work when designing a report.

• Summarize before visualizing: Don't throw raw, unaggregated data at a chart. Use filters, "Top N," and summarization to focus only on what matters.
• Choose the right visual for the data density: Use a dropdown for a long list of filter options. Use a matrix or table with search for high-volume, detail-level data.
• Design for a standard size: Set your page to a 16:9 ratio and stick with the "Fit to page" view to ensure it looks well on most modern devices.
• Mindful sizing: Allocate plenty of space for key visuals, and reduce font sizes only as a last resort to make visuals look consistent and uniform across report pages.

Final Thoughts

Removing scroll bars in Power BI is about finding the right balance between the size of your visuals and the amount of data you're asking them to display. By combining smart resizing, thoughtful data filtering, and choosing the appropriate visual types, you can create clean, professional, and easy-to-read reports every time.

Mastering tools like Power BI often involves a learning curve filled with tedious formatting and endless "pixel pushing" to get everything just right. We created Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require you to be a dashboard designer. With Graphed, you just connect your data and describe what you want to see - "Show me a comparison of last month's ad spend versus sales by campaign" - and it instantly builds a live, interactive dashboard for you, completely eliminating that manual formatting drain.