What are Custom Visuals in Power BI?

While Power BI’s built-in charts and graphs will get you pretty far, you’ll eventually hit a point where you need something more specific or visually engaging. This is where custom visuals come in, extending Power BI's capabilities far beyond its default settings. This article will show you what custom visuals are, where to find them, and how to start using them to level up your reports.

What Are Power BI Custom Visuals?

Power BI custom visuals are, essentially, third-party charts and graphs that you can add to your reports. Think of them as apps or plugins for your Power BI visualizations. You aren’t limited to the standard collection of bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs that come baked into the software. Instead, you can tap into a massive library of visuals created by Microsoft, third-party developers, and the wider Power BI community to find the perfect chart for your specific data story.

These visuals are built using an open-source framework, which means anyone with the right skills can develop, test, and share a new way to visualize data. This has led to a constantly growing ecosystem of options for nearly every industry and use case imaginable.

When to Look Beyond the Defaults

The standard visuals are great for a reason - they cover the vast majority of day-to-day reporting needs. Bar charts are perfect for comparisons, line charts for trends, and scatter plots for relationships. But sometimes, your data demands a more specialized approach. You should consider using custom visuals when you want to:

Tell a More Specific Story: A Gantt chart is infinitely better for visualizing a project timeline than a standard bar chart. A word cloud can instantly show you the most frequent terms in customer feedback, which a table would make you manually search for.
Analyze Hierarchical Data Intuitively: While you can use a treemap or drill-down features on a bar chart, a visual like a Sunburst chart provides a much more intuitive, multi-layered view of hierarchical data - like sales breakdown by continent, then country, then city.
Create Highly-Branded, Infographic-Style Reports: Sometimes a standard chart just looks... standard. Visuals like the Infographic Designer allow you to break free from rectangles and circles, using custom icons and shapes that align with your brand for a truly bespoke dashboard.
Improve User Interaction: Standard slicers and filters are functional, but custom visuals like the Chiclet Slicer can transform filtering into a more engaging, button-like experience, even allowing you to use images as filters.

Custom visuals aren't about replacing the basics, they're about expanding your toolkit so you have the perfect instrument for every unique analytical challenge you encounter.

Where to Find and Add Power BI Custom Visuals

Getting started with custom visuals is straightforward. You have two primary methods for adding them to your Power BI projects: browsing the official AppSource marketplace directly within Power BI, or importing a visual from a local file.

Method 1: Using Microsoft AppSource (The Easiest & Safest Way)

Microsoft AppSource is the official marketplace for Power BI visuals, Office add-ins, and other business applications. It's the most common and recommended way to find new visuals because it’s integrated directly into Power BI Desktop and has a layer of vetting and certification from Microsoft.

Here’s how to access it:

Open the Visualizations Pane: In Power BI Desktop, look at the Visualizations pane on the right-hand side. This is where your default charts like bar, line, and pie are located.
Click the Three Dots (…): At the bottom of the icons for visualizations, click on the ellipsis (the three horizontal dots). A small menu will pop up.
Select "Get More Visuals": Clicking this option will open the AppSource marketplace in a pop-up window, right inside Power BI.

Once the AppSource window is open, you can:

Search for Visuals: Use the search bar at the top to look for specific types of charts (e.g., "Gantt," "word cloud," "funnel").
Filter by Category: Browse categories on the left like "Analytics," "Time," "Filters," or "Maps" to discover new visuals you might not have known about.
Look for Certified Visuals: Some visuals have a blue checkmark badge next to them, indicating they are "Power BI Certified." This means Microsoft has thoroughly reviewed the visual's code to ensure it meets strict security and performance standards. It won't access external services or send your data outside your tenant. Using certified visuals is the best practice for most business environments.

Once you find a visual you like, simply click on it and hit the "Add" button. The new visual's icon will appear in your Visualizations pane, ready to be used just like any default chart.

Method 2: Importing a Custom Visual from a File (.pbiviz)

Sometimes you’ll find a custom visual outside of AppSource - perhaps from a developer's website like GitHub, a specialized vendor, or one that was created internally by your own company's development team. In these cases, the visual will be packaged as a .pbiviz file.

To use one of these, you'll need to import it:

First, download the .pbiviz file and save it to a known location on your computer.
In Power BI's Visualizations pane, click the ellipsis (…) again.
This time, select "Import a Visual from a File."
A warning prompt will appear. This is Power BI telling you that it can't vouch for the security or performance of a file from an external source. It’s a good reminder to only import files from developers you trust. Click "Import" to proceed.
Finally, navigate to where you saved the .pbiviz file, select it, and click "Open."

The new visual will now be added to your Visualizations pane, just like the ones from AppSource.

5 Popular & Useful Custom Visuals to Try Today

With hundreds of visuals to choose from, knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Here are five popular and practical custom visuals that solve common reporting problems.

1. Word Cloud

What it does: This visual takes text data and displays it in a cluster, where the size of each word corresponds to its frequency or importance. It's a fantastic way to quickly spot prevailing themes in qualitative data.

Best for: Marketing managers analyzing customer survey responses, product managers sifting through support tickets for common issues, or content creators looking at top-performing keywords. It turns a wall of text into instant insight.

2. Chiclet Slicer

What it does: The Chiclet Slicer is an enhanced version of the default Power BI slicer (filter). Instead of a simple list or dropdown, it turns your filters into sleek, clickable buttons that can even contain images.

Best for: E-commerce dashboards where users can filter products by clicking on images of product categories. It creates a much more intuitive and web-like navigation experience for the end-user.

3. Gantt Chart by MAQ Software

What it does: Brings full-featured project management visualization into Power BI. It displays project timelines, task start/end dates, dependencies between tasks, and completion percentages all in one clear visual.

Best for: Project managers, operations leads, and team managers who need to track project progress against milestones without having to switch to a separate tool like Microsoft Project or Asana.

4. Sunburst Chart by MAQ Software

What it does: This is a radial treemap, perfect for visualizing hierarchical data. The central circle represents the root total, and each outer ring is broken down into its constituent parts, allowing users to intuitively see the part-to-whole relationship across multiple levels.

Best for: Financial analysts breaking down a budget into departments and then into line items, or sales teams visualizing revenue by region, country, and sales representative in one compact chart. It's a far more engaging alternative to nested pie charts.

5. Infographic Designer

What it does: This incredibly versatile visual lets you escape the traditional chart format entirely. You can use different shapes, colors, and icons to represent data, essentially custom-building your own infographic right inside Power BI.

Best for: Anyone creating a high-stakes presentation for leadership or marketing materials. For example, instead of a bar chart showing website traffic sources, you could use icons of a magnifying glass for organic search, social media logos for referrals, etc., with the size of each icon corresponding to its traffic share.

A Quick Note on Security: Certified vs. Uncertified

When you start exploring the world of custom visuals, you’ll constantly see the term "Power BI Certified." It’s an important distinction to understand. To earn this certification, a visual must pass a rigorous set of tests conducted by Microsoft. These tests ensure the visual:

Does not access any external services or resources.
Follows secure coding best practices.
Maintains high performance standards.

Uncertified visuals aren't necessarily dangerous, but they haven't gone through this strict review process. They might be perfectly fine, or they could potentially be less performant or have code that poses a security risk. In many corporate environments, IT administrators will configure Power BI to only allow the use of certified visuals to maintain strict data governance.

When in doubt, always stick with Certified visuals from AppSource, and only use uncertified .pbiviz files from sources you absolutely trust.

Final Thoughts

Standard Power BI visuals are the workhorses of data reporting, but custom visuals unlock a whole new dimension of tailored analysis and data storytelling. By learning how to find, add, and use them, you can build dashboards that not only answer key business questions but also do so in a way that is clear, engaging, and perfectly suited to your data.

Of course, learning which visual to use and how to configure it in a tool like Power BI is still a manual process with a steep learning curve. While powerful, it often requires hours of tweaking to get right. That's why we built Graphed. We automate the whole reporting workflow by letting you connect your data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce - and simply describe the dashboard you need in plain English. The AI analyst builds the charts and reports for you, turning hours of configuration into a 30-second conversation and letting you focus on the insights, not the setup.