Power BI ships with ~30 built-in visuals. Master a dozen and you can build essentially any analyst report. The AppSource marketplace has hundreds more — most are bad, a few are genuinely useful. The skill is knowing which built-in for which claim, and resisting the urge to install a custom visual when a built-in would do.
The 12 built-ins worth knowing
- Card and Multi-Row Card: big single numbers. Use as the headline KPI.
- Bar / Column chart: comparison across categories. Sort descending almost always.
- Line chart: change over time. Cap at 4-5 series.
- Area chart: stacked or filled line for composition over time.
- Pie / Donut: only for 2-3 dominant slices. Skip otherwise.
- Matrix: pivot-table-like crosstab with hierarchical rows and columns.
- Table: detailed rows with conditional formatting.
- Map / Filled Map: geographic data. Built-in Bing maps; ArcGIS for serious GIS work.
- KPI: actual vs target with a trend line.
- Slicer: user-controlled filters. Tile, list, dropdown, between-range modes.
- Scatter / Bubble: correlation, optionally with a third dimension as size.
- Decomposition Tree: hierarchical drill-down. Newer; underused.
Conditional formatting is the killer feature
Right-click any column in a Table or Matrix → Conditional Formatting → choose Background Color, Font Color, or Data Bars. Apply via a calculated rule (e.g., red if measure < target, green if above). A boring table becomes a heatmap that surfaces exceptions instantly. Combined with Sort by another column, this is how analysts build single-page operational dashboards that get used daily.
Custom visuals from AppSource
A few that earn their place: Drill Down Donut PRO (better donut), Hierarchy Slicer (multi-level), Custom Calendar (heat-map by day), Bullet Chart (target with thresholds), and Sankey Diagram (flow visualisation). Beyond these, most custom visuals are gimmicky. They also slow refresh, complicate sharing, and may break across Power BI version updates.
Theming
View → Themes → Browse for themes. A JSON theme file controls every colour, font, and visual default across a report. Many enterprises maintain a corporate theme; apply it to every report for instant brand consistency. The PowerBI.tips Theme Generator is a free tool that builds these JSONs.
Exercise
Build a one-page Power BI report with: a KPI card (current value + target + trend), a sorted bar chart (top 10 categories), and a matrix table with conditional formatting on the values column. No custom visuals. How long does it take to build? How does it compare to what you'd build in Excel?