How to Make Any Chart in Power BI (And When to Use Each One)
Power BI has dozens of chart types — but most dashboards only need six or seven. Here’s a practical guide to the charts that matter, how to build them, and when to use each one.
Opening the Visualizations pane in Power BI for the first time is a bit overwhelming. There are 30+ chart types before you even add custom visuals from AppSource. Which one do you use? When? And how do you actually build it?
The honest answer is that most real-world dashboards use the same six or seven chart types repeatedly. Master those and you can answer almost any business question visually. This guide covers each one — what it’s for, when to use it, and how to build it in Power BI.
The workhorse of data visualization. Bar charts (horizontal) and column charts (vertical) are the same chart rotated — use column for fewer categories, bar when category names are long or there are many categories.
This is the chart you’ll use most often. Sales by region, revenue by product category, orders by month — these are all bar or column chart questions.
How to build it: Drag your measure (e.g. Total Sales) to the Y-axis field and your category (e.g. Region) to the X-axis field. Power BI builds the chart automatically. Add a legend field if you want grouped bars by a second dimension.
Use vertical (column) when you have fewer than 8 categories and short labels. Switch to horizontal (bar) when labels are long or you have 8+ categories — it’s much more readable.
Line charts are for time series data — whenever your X-axis is a date or time period. They show how a value changes over time, making trends, seasonality, and growth patterns immediately visible.
How to build it: Drag your date field to the X-axis and your measure to the Y-axis. Power BI will automatically offer date hierarchy options (Year → Quarter → Month → Day) — use the drill-down arrows to navigate between levels.
Add a second measure to the secondary Y-axis to compare two metrics on the same chart — e.g. revenue and order count. This avoids cluttering your dashboard with two separate charts for related data.
The card visual displays a single number — total revenue, total customers, conversion rate, average order value. It’s the first thing most dashboards show at the top of the page, giving the viewer the most important number immediately before they look at anything else.
How to build it: Click the card visual icon in the Visualizations pane, then drag your measure to the Fields well. Format the display unit (thousands, millions) and font size in the Format pane.
The Multi-row Card visual lets you show several KPIs in a compact format side by side. Ideal for a KPI summary row at the top of your dashboard page.
Pie and donut charts show how a whole is divided into parts — what percentage of total revenue comes from each region, or what share of customers belong to each segment. Use these sparingly and only when you have 5 or fewer categories.
Donut is generally preferred over pie — the hole in the centre can display a total or label, and it’s slightly easier to read. Both are overused in practice — if you have more than 5 slices, a bar chart communicates the same information more clearly.
How to build it: Drag your measure to Values and your category to Legend. Adjust colours in the Format pane under Data colours.
Never use a pie or donut chart with more than 5 categories — the slices become too small to read and the chart communicates nothing clearly. Switch to a bar chart instead.
The Matrix visual is Power BI’s version of a pivot table. It lets you display a measure broken down by both rows and columns at the same time — for example, revenue by product category (rows) and by quarter (columns). It’s powerful for detailed performance breakdowns.
How to build it: Add fields to Rows, Columns, and Values. Enable subtotals in Format → Row subtotals and Column subtotals. Use conditional formatting to add colour scales — this turns a plain table into a heat map that makes high and low values immediately visible.
Right-click any value field in a matrix → Conditional formatting → Background colour. Set a colour scale from red (low) to green (high). This single step makes patterns in the data immediately visible without any extra measures.
Waterfall charts show how an initial value increases and decreases through a series of steps to reach a final value. They’re perfect for explaining revenue bridges, budget variance, and profit breakdowns — anywhere you need to show “we started here, these things added, these things subtracted, and we ended here.”
How to build it: Add your category to Category and your measure to Y-axis. Power BI automatically colour-codes increases (green) and decreases (red). You can pin specific bars as totals in the Format pane.
Scatter charts plot individual data points on an X-Y axis to show correlations, clusters, and outliers. Each point represents an entity (a customer, a product, a store) positioned by two measures. They’re excellent for spotting which products have high revenue but low margin, or which customers have high frequency but low spend.
How to build it: Add one measure to X-axis, another to Y-axis, and your entity (e.g. product name) to Details. Add a third measure to Size to create a bubble chart where bubble size represents a third dimension.
Quick Decision Guide — Which Chart for Which Question?
| Business question | Best chart | Why |
|---|---|---|
| How does revenue compare by region? | Bar / Column chart | Comparing values across categories |
| How has revenue trended this year? | Line chart | Change over time |
| What is total revenue this month? | Card visual | Single KPI number |
| What % of sales come from each channel? | Donut chart | Part-to-whole (≤5 categories) |
| Revenue by product AND by quarter? | Matrix | Two dimensions simultaneously |
| How did we go from $1M to $1.3M? | Waterfall chart | Showing additive contributions |
| Which products have high revenue but low margin? | Scatter chart | Relationship between two measures |
| How many customers per segment, country, city? | Treemap | Hierarchical part-to-whole |
The Formatting Rules That Make Every Chart Better
Building the chart is the easy part. Making it communicate clearly is where most beginners stop short. These formatting habits make an immediate difference:
- Remove chart titles and replace them with text boxes — Power BI’s default chart titles are generic. Delete them and add a text box above the visual with a specific, insight-driven title like “North region leads on margin” rather than “Sales by Region.”
- Turn off gridlines on most charts — Format → Y-axis → Gridlines → Off. Gridlines add visual noise. Data labels on the bars communicate the same information more precisely.
- Use one consistent colour palette — Pick your brand colours and apply them consistently. Colour should encode meaning (e.g. red = underperforming, green = on target), not just make the chart look colourful.
- Always sort bar charts — Sort descending by value, not alphabetically. The viewer’s eye naturally goes to the left — put the most important bar there.
- Use display units — Format large numbers as £1.2M instead of £1,200,000. It’s easier to scan and looks more professional.
Every visual on your dashboard should answer exactly one question. If you can’t write that question in one sentence, the visual is trying to do too much — split it into two.