How to Use Charticulator in Power BI

Tired of being limited by Power BI's default chart library? Charticulator is a powerful custom visual that lets you build completely bespoke, data-driven visuals without writing a single line of code. This guide walks you through exactly what Charticulator is, when to use it, and how to create your first custom chart, step-by-step.

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What is Charticulator and Why Should You Use It?

Charticulator is a free, Microsoft-developed custom visual for Power BI that provides a visual design environment for creating charts. Think of it less like a traditional chart builder and more like a graphic design tool, like Illustrator or Figma, but for your data. Instead of selecting from a rigid list of chart types, you build your visual from the ground up by combining primitive shapes (rectangles, circles, symbols) and binding them to your data fields.

This "grammatical" approach to chart design gives you complete control over every element, allowing you to create visuals that are impossible with standard Power BI visuals. You can design everything from visually striking bar charts with embedded icons to complex small multiples, connected dot plots, and radial charts that precisely match your brand's unique style guide.

When to Use Charticulator (and When Not To)

While Charticulator is incredibly powerful, it isn't the right tool for every situation. Knowing when to reach for it is half the battle.

Use Charticulator When:

• Standard visuals fall short. You have a unique story to tell, and a standard bar or pie chart just doesn't capture the nuance of the relationships in your data.
• You need high brand fidelity. Your organization has a strict visual identity, and you want your data visualizations to perfectly align with your brand's fonts, colors, and design principles.
• You're building complex or novel chart types. You want to create something specific like a bump chart to show ranking changes, a Gantt chart with dependencies, or a Nightingale rose chart.
• You need to represent nested or hierarchical data visually. Charticulator excels at building visuals that represent parent-child relationships in a single, cohesive view.

Stick with Standard Visuals When:

• A simple chart will do. Don't overcomplicate things. If a standard bar chart clearly and effectively communicates the message, use it. The primary goal is always clarity, not complexity.
• You're in a hurry. Charticulator has a learning curve. If you need to produce a report in five minutes, stick to the built-in visuals you already know.
• Your audience expects familiarity. Introducing a brand-new, complex chart type can sometimes confuse audiences who are used to standard business charts. Know your stakeholders and their level of data literacy.

Getting Started: Your First Charticulator Visual

Ready to build? The first step is getting the Charticulator visual added to your Power BI Desktop environment and preparing your data for it.

Step 1: Installing the Charticulator Visual

Because Charticulator isn't a native visual, you first need to add it from Microsoft's AppSource marketplace.

1. Open your report in Power BI Desktop.
2. In the Visualizations pane, click the three dots (...) at the bottom and select Get more visuals.
3. In the Power BI Visuals marketplace that pops up, use the search bar to look for "Charticulator".
4. Find the visual by Microsoft and click the Add button.

Once imported, you'll see a new icon for Charticulator in your Visualizations pane, ready to be used.

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Step 2: Preparing Your Data

Charticulator works best with data in a simple, tabular format. For our first example, we'll create a custom bar chart to display sales across different product categories. Imagine your dataset looks like this:

Category (Text): Electronics, Apparel, Home Goods, Books Sales (Number): 150000, 95000, 120000, 60000

The key is having your categorical data (like "Category") and your numerical data (like "Sales") ready as distinct columns in your data model.

Step 3: Launching the Charticulator Editor

With the visual installed and data ready, it's time to launch the editor.

1. Click the Charticulator icon in the Visualizations pane to add it to your report canvas.
2. With the new visual selected, drag your data fields into the Data well. For our example, drag Category and Sales into this area.
3. You'll see a placeholder on the visual. Click the "Create Chart" button to launch the full Charticulator editor in a new window.

Understanding the Charticulator Interface

The editor interface can look intimidating at first, but it’s organized into a few key areas that work together. Understanding these panels is the key to mastering the tool.

Main Canvas (Plot Segment): This is the large central area where your chart will be built. You define the overall structure here. Glyph Panel: A "glyph" is a visual representation of a single data point or a row in your dataset. In this panel, you design what that individual data point looks like by adding shapes, text, or icons. Layers Panel: This panel lists all the elements of your chart, organized hierarchically. Here you'll see your plot segment, glyphs, and any shapes or marks you add to them. You use this to select and modify different parts of your visualization. Attributes Panel: This is the control center for any selected element. When you click on a shape in the Glyph panel or a plot segment in the Layers panel, this is where you'll configure its properties - like height, width, color, and font size - often by dragging data fields onto them.

Building a Custom Bar Chart with Sales Data

Let’s continue our example and build the bars for our sales chart.

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Step 4: Defining the Bar (The Glyph)

First, we need to design what one "bar" will look like. Since a bar is just a rectangle, this is straightforward.

1. In the Glyph panel, drag the Rectangle mark onto the glyph canvas. This rectangle represents a single data point (e.g., the sales for "Electronics").
2. With the rectangle shape still selected, look over at the Attributes panel. Here, you'll see properties like Fill, Shape, Size, etc.
3. Find the Width attribute. Drag your Sales field from the Data panel on the left and drop it onto the Width property. You've just told Charticulator that the width of this rectangle should be determined by the 'Sales' value for each category.

You'll notice the rectangle resizes, symbolizing this new data binding.

Step 5: Arranging the Bars on the Canvas

We've designed what one bar looks like. Now we need to tell Charticulator how to tile or stack these glyphs to create the full bar chart.

1. Drag the Glyph from the Glyph panel (it looks like a small square with your rectangle in it) and drop it onto the main Plot Segment canvas.
2. Click on Plot Segment 1 in the Layers panel to select it.
3. In the Attributes panel for the Plot Segment, find the "Stack Y" property. This property tells Charticulator how to arrange the glyphs in the vertical direction.
4. Drag your Category field from the Data list and drop it onto the Stack Y property.

Instantly, you should see multiple bars appear on the canvas, one for each unique value in your "Category" column. Charticulator has created one instance of your glyph for each category and arranged them vertically.

Step 6: Adding Axes for Context

A chart isn't complete without axes to provide context. Charticulator includes smart guides to help you create them.

1. To create the Y-axis (category labels), drag your Category field and drop it onto the Y-axis area to the left of the plot segment.
2. To create the X-axis (sales values), drag your Sales field from the Data table and drop it onto the X-axis area at the bottom of the plot segment.

Axes with labels will automatically appear. You can click on either axis line or the labels to customize their appearance, such as font size, color, and tick marks, in the Attributes Panel.

Step 7: Saving Your Chart and Returning to Power BI

Once you are happy with your design in the editor:

1. Click the Save button (it's the small floppy disk icon) at the top left of the Charticulator window.
2. Click the Back to report button next to it.

The editor will close, and your Power BI report canvas will update to show the fully rendered custom visual you just designed. You can now resize it, add a title, and format it like any other Power BI visual.

Going Beyond the Basics: Tips and Tricks

You’ve built a simple bar chart, but the real power of Charticulator lies in its advanced capabilities.

Creating Links and Connections

Charticulator allows you to draw lines or bands between different glyphs using the "Links" feature. This is how you create slope graphs (to show change between two points), Gantt charts (connecting duration start and end points), or network diagrams. You can define linking logic based on shared categories in your data tables.

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Using Conditions for Dynamic Formatting

What if you want to highlight underperforming categories? In the Attributes panel for any mark (like our rectangle), you can define a Condition for properties like color. For instance, you could set a condition so that the fill color is red if 'Sales' is less than a certain number. This adds a powerful layer of pre-attentive analysis to your visuals.

Exporting and Reusing Templates

One of the best features for efficiency is templating. Once you’ve perfected a custom design, you can export it as a .charticulator template file. You can then import this template into another Charticulator instance in a different report, re-map the data fields, and instantly have your custom visual ready to go. This empowers teams to create a library of on-brand, reusable chart assets.

Final Thoughts

Charticulator unlocks an entirely new level of creative freedom within Power BI. It allows you to break free from standard layouts and build visualizations that perfectly communicate your data's story with clarity and style. While the initial learning curve feels different from native Power BI visuals, understanding its core concepts of glyphs, layers, and data-binding opens up a world of possibilities.

Designing elaborate custom visuals is powerful, but sometimes you just need to get quick answers and dashboards without the manual build process. Crafting reports, even with amazing tools, can still be a time-consuming step between raw data and actionable insight. At Graphed, we specialize in collapsing that timeline. Using simple natural language, you can connect your advertising, sales, and analytics data sources and create live, interactive dashboards in a matter of seconds. Instead of wrestling with a visual editor, we let you talk to your data, so you can spend less time building reports and more time making decisions. Give Graphed a try to see how fast analytics can be.