How a Customized Theme in Microsoft Power BI can Improve your Reports

Ronelle Raath, 17 April 2020

With Microsoft Power BI you can easily achieve effective visual reports and dashboards from data captured within your business.

However, to ensure you are putting together decent visuals you need to consider some key elements like keeping things simple, clear and concise as well as intuitive. You would want the information shown to be instantly clear and attainable.

One way of achieving this easily is with familiarity. Familiarity is known to increase the processing speed of visuals (See for reference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/670489v1.full)

In this blog I will show you how to easily achieve familiarity by customizing and personalizing a theme to your brand that will apply to all your built reports instantly.

Within Power BI Desktop you have the following Theme Options available:

Use pre-set themes already available
Use community-built themes via theme gallery

Customize your own personal theme

So, let’s have a look at the options available and which would suit you best.

Access a range of pre-set themes available to you via View:

With just a click you can select any pre-set theme you prefer to apply to your report.

Expand on theme option with the Theme Gallery option:

This will direct you to the Power BI community Themes Gallery (https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Themes-Gallery/bd-p/ThemesGallery)

Here you have several custom themes available to choose from.

Finally, you can customise your own theme from a current pre-set theme:

Please note that if this option is not available to you, you might have to activate it within settings:

Once selected, you’ll have the option to change colours, text, visuals, pages and filter panes as per your specific branding guidelines.

To summarise

Using themes for your built reports will ensure a familiar look and feel your users can immediately recognise and relate to, instantly improving them with minimal effort spent.

So, once you’ve done all the hard work in preparing your data to create amazingly informative reports, go and give them an instant upgrade by using your own custom theme.

Without a customised theme:

With a customised theme: