Power BI Report Design

Power BI Report Design

Use pbir for every report mutation. The pbir-format skill is read-only schema context. If the CLI is unavailable or lacks an operation, stop and report the gap.

Best practices and guidelines for Power BI report design. Follow these guidelines strictly to avoid generic, poorly formatted reports ("Power BI Slop").

Be innovative, pushing boundaries while adhering to data visualization rules and guidelines. Work within Power BI's constraints, aiming for simplicity and effectiveness over aesthetics and decoration. Focus reports, pages, and visuals on answering specific questions and minimizing cognitive load -- not on looking "pretty and impressive".

When a user request contradicts these guidelines, push back and explain better alternatives. The goal is to inform the user of options that lead to improved outcomes.

Design identity (commit before layout)

Before any layout work, lock the report's identity so every later choice has something to cite:

1. Pick one tone ... a committed ink budget (restrained, corporate, editorial, or technical) that fixes accent count, saturation, gridline weight, and how forward annotation gets
2. Pick one signature (two at most) ... a single recurring element (header band, single-accent-hue rule, fixed nav rail, KPI silhouette, callout style, target-line convention) repeated identically on every page, so the report reads as one artifact
3. Route each page to one shape by the question it answers (summary, monitoring, exploration, comparison, narrative)

Recording tone and signature once is what turns "use muted colors" into a propagating decision. See references/design-identity.md for the tone budgets and signature catalog, and references/page-shapes.md for routing each page to a shape. Serialize the identity into the theme via the modifying-theme-json skill, not into per-visual overrides.

Core rules

1. 3-30-300 Rule: The most important and least detailed information should be in the top-left (KPIs, cards, etc.) while the least important and most detailed information should be in the bottom-right
2. Titles: All report pages should have a title using a textBox visualType or a title in a background image added to the report page canvas
3. Visual positioning, alignment, and spacing: All visuals must have equal spacing between them and equal spacing between the edge of the page (the margin). If visuals are unaligned or this spacing is unequal, fix it to ensure alignment and equal spacing
4. Themes: Reports should use a theme that differs from the default Power BI themes; a suggested theme is the sqlbi theme (see the modifying-theme-json skill for applying templates). Themes are preferred because they provide a set of default styles for all charts that can adhere to good design practices and brand or style guidelines
5. Semantic Models: Reports in Power BI are complex. They are dependant on an underlying semantic model (either in the .SemanticModel folder, called a "thick report" or a published model in Power BI/Fabric, called a "thin report"). Much of the functionality from a Power BI report comes from its semantic model design or DAX code
6. Report extensions, or thin report measures: It is possible to create calculation logic in Power BI report, called "thin report measures" or "visual calculations". These should be used sparingly and only for "report-specific" scenarios
7. Visual fields: All data visuals should have field bindings, and all field bindings should be for fields that actually exist in the model; there is no reason for visuals to exist that have no fields bound
8. Chart selection: Make smart choices about what visuals to use for each scenario. Visual vocabulary is essential for this skill.
9. Use of color: Color and formatting decisions must cite the locked identity (the chosen tone and signature), not be picked per visual. Colors come from the theme (themedataColor) rather than inline hex, so the identity propagates and re-themes cleanly. Colors should be muted and soft; colors that implicitly encode meaning (like red=bad, green=good) should be avoided unless using them for that encoding. Consider colorblindness and use accessible palettes (blues instead of greens with reds, for instance).
10. Pre-attentive attributes: Styles and colors should be used to steer and direct attention, and not to decorate charts. Formatting of visuals should be intentional and not purely aesthetic. Styles should where possible be stored in the theme and not in bespoke visual configuration.
11. Fonts: Prefer Segoe UI and Segoe UI Semibold. Do not use custom fonts, since they aren't guaranteed to render on user computers. Evaluate whether fonts are sufficiently large to be readable given the visual and page size.
12. Page intent: Route each page to exactly one shape by the question it answers (see references/page-shapes.md). A page trying to answer two questions is two pages.

Page Layout Guidelines

Check Page Size Before Modifying