Ravindra BagaleCourses & study guides

14. Visuals and Their Formatting

14.1 Creating a Visual Step by Step

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Steps in Power BI

  1. In Report view, click an empty area of the canvas (so no visual is selected).
  2. In the Visualizations pane, open Build visual (the first icon) and click a visual type, e.g. Clustered column chart. An empty placeholder appears.
  3. Drag fields from the Data pane into the field wells (for example X-axis = DarkStore[City], Y-axis = [Total Orders]). Or tick a field in the Data pane and Power BI places it for you.
  4. Resize with the handles and move it by dragging its border. Hold Shift while resizing to keep proportions. Use View › Gridlines / Snap to grid for alignment.
  5. Open Format visual (the paintbrush icon) to format it (14.2).
  6. Use More options (…) on the visual header to Sort axis (for example Total Orders, Descending), Show as a table, Export data and Spotlight.
  7. To change the visual type, select it and click a different icon. Fields are kept where possible.

Ravindra Bagale's Tip

Friends, many students drag fields onto an empty canvas and accept whatever chart Power BI picks. Choose the visual type first, then drop fields into the right wells (X-axis, Y-axis, Legend). Also use your measures, not raw numeric columns, so you don't end up with an implicit "Sum of Amount". Don't worry – after doing it two or three times, it becomes a habit.