How to Use Format Painter in Power BI

Building a report in Power BI often feels like two separate jobs: first, getting the data right, and second, making it look good. Getting every font, color, border, and title aligned across all your visuals can turn into a tedious, click-heavy task. This guide will show you how to use one of Power BI's simplest and most powerful features, the Format Painter, to save hours and create stunning, consistent reports with just a few clicks.

What is the Format Painter?

If you've ever used Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the Power BI Format Painter will feel instantly familiar. It's a tool that lets you copy all the formatting from one visual and apply it to one or more other visuals in your report. Instead of manually navigating the Visualizations pane to change a dozen different settings for each chart, you can do it all in a single action.

Think of it as a "copy and paste" function, but strictly for the style - the aesthetics - of your visual. It copies properties like:

• Colors and fonts
• Title text styles (font, size, alignment)
• Background, border, and shadow settings
• Axis labels and formatting
• Data label appearance
• And much more!

Using the Format Painter helps you avoid the painstaking process of remembering specific hex codes for colors or font sizes you used on another chart. This ensures your dashboard has a clean, professional, and consistent look and feel, which is crucial for making your data easy to digest.

Where to Find the Format Painter in Power BI

Finding the Format Painter is straightforward. You can find its paintbrush icon on the Home tab of the Power BI Desktop ribbon, located within the Clipboard group.

It sits alongside the familiar Cut, Copy, and Paste options. The icon remains greyed out until you select a visual on your report canvas, at which point it becomes active and ready to use.

How to Use Format Painter: A Step-by-Step Guide

Using the Format Painter is a simple, three-step process. Let's walk through a classic example: applying the style of a well-formatted bar chart to a brand new one.

Imagine you've spent ten minutes perfecting a bar chart. You've adjusted the data colors, customized the title text, formatted the X and Y axes, and added a subtle shadow to make it pop. Now, you’ve added a second bar chart to your report, and it has the default, bland Power BI styling.

Step 1: Select Your Source Visual

First, click once on the visual that has the formatting you want to copy. This is your "master" or "source" visual. In our example, this is the first, beautifully styled bar chart. When you select it, a border will appear around it, and the Format Painter icon will become clickable.

Step 2: Activate the Format Painter

With your source visual selected, go to the Home tab and click the Format Painter icon. Your cursor will change to a paintbrush symbol, indicating that Power BI has now "copied" the formatting and is ready to paste it onto another visual.

Step 3: Click the Target Visual

Now, move your paintbrush cursor over to the unstyled "target" visual (your second bar chart) and click on it. Instantly, all the formatting - the data colors, title style, axis settings, and shadow - from your source chart will be applied to the target chart.

That's it! In just three clicks, you've saved yourself the hassle of repeating numerous formatting steps manually.

How to Apply Formatting to Multiple Visuals at Once

What if you have five, ten, or twenty visuals you want to update? Clicking the Format Painter icon over and over for each one would be a pain. Luckily, Power BI includes a handy shortcut for applying formatting to multiple visuals in one go.

The trick is to double-click the Format Painter icon.

1. Select your source visual (the one with the perfect formatting).
2. Double-click the Format Painter icon in the ribbon.
3. Your cursor will change to a paintbrush and will stay "locked" in formatting mode.
4. Click on the first target visual to apply the formatting.
5. Click on the second target visual to apply the same formatting.
6. Continue clicking on every visual you want to format.

When you’re finished, you can press the Esc key on your keyboard or click the Format Painter icon one more time to deactivate it. This "mode" is a massive time-saver when creating large, multi-page reports or styling visuals that you've just added to your dashboard.

What Formatting Properties Are Copied?

The Format Painter is incredibly powerful and copies a wide range of properties from the Visualizations pane. While the exact properties depend on the visual types involved, here’s a general rundown of what you can expect to be copied:

• General Properties: Size, position (X and Y coordinates), and layer order.
• Title: Font family, size, color, background color, and alignment.
• Visual Aesthetics: Background color/transparency, borders, and shadows.
• Tooltips: Custom tooltip settings.
• Chart-Specific Settings:
• Slicers: Slicer settings, header formatting, and item styles (font, color).
• Conditional Formatting: Any conditional formatting rules you've set up (e.g., changing bar color based on value) will also be copied.

Limitations of the Format Painter (And What to Watch Out For)

While the Format Painter is a game-changer, it has a few limitations and behaviors that are important to know to avoid confusion.

1. It copies style, not a visual type. The Format Painter will not change a bar chart into a line chart or a pie chart into a table. It only transfers formatting settings between existing visuals.
2. It only copies relevant properties. Power BI is smart enough to only apply formatting that makes sense for the target visual. For example, if you copy formatting from a bar chart (which has an X and Y axis) and apply it to a Card visual (which does not have an axis), it will only transfer applicable properties like font style, background color, and border. The axis formatting will simply be ignored, as it doesn't apply to the Card.
3. Size and Position can be tricky. While handy at times, the painter also copies the size (height and width) and position of the visual. If you're trying to format visuals of different sizes, you may have to resize your target visual after applying the new format. Keep this in mind, especially when styling a mix of large charts and small KPIs.

Practical Tips for Maximum Efficiency

Here are a few pro-tips to integrate the Format Painter into your daily workflow:

Create a "Master Style" Visual on a Hidden Page

A great best practice is to create a dedicated, hidden tab in your Power BI report named something like "Formatting" or "Admin". On this page, create one of each type of visual you commonly use (a bar chart, a line chart, a card, a slicer) and style it exactly how you want it to look according to your brand guidelines.

Whenever you need to add a new visual to your report, you can simply go to your hidden formatting page, copy the style from your master visual, and apply it to your new one. This ensures absolute consistency across even the largest reports.

Use Themes First, Format Painter Second

Power BI Themes are fantastic for setting up the baseline look and feel of your entire report - they define the default color palettes, font families, and other global settings. Use a theme to get 80% of the way there. Then, use the Format Painter for the remaining 20% - for those unique, one-off tweaks where a specific visual needs slightly different settings than the rest.

Remember Undo is Your Friend

Accidentally painted the wrong visual or didn't like the new format? Don't worry. A quick Ctrl + Z (or the Undo button) will revert the change instantly. Don't be afraid to experiment, you can always go back.

Final Thoughts

Mastering the Format Painter is one of the quickest ways to elevate the quality of your Power BI reports while significantly speeding up your development time. It transforms formatting from a repetitive chore into a quick, satisfying task, leaving you more time to focus on what truly matters: uncovering insights from your data.

Even with great shortcuts, building dashboards in traditional BI tools can feel like a constant battle of manual setup, configuration, and formatting. We built Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn't require you to become an expert report designer. Instead of clicking through formatting panes, you can simply ask for what you need - "Show me website traffic from the last month in a line chart" - and we instantly generate a clean, professional visual for your dashboard, no manual styling required.