Data Bear’s Monday Motivation Blog Post

So you see in your mind’s eye this beautiful KPI card for your report, you’ve googled ideas, but somehow the default ones just aren’t fulfilling your ideas?  In this post, I will show you some creative ideas to make your own custom KPI card in Power BI that will look professional and attractive.  I have looked at many videos and other blog posts and got some great ideas and have combined them into 3 KPI’s options.  You can use these ideas like I use them or mix them up.  I will pop some credit links to the inspiring blogger and vloggers that helped me in creating these.

I have to add this disclaimer, these cards are mainly layering of more than 1 visual, and if you intend for them to be pinned to a dashboard on the Power BI Service, I suggest you test your idea first, before spending a lot of time creating them, as they may not deliver the desired effect for that purpose.  The reason being, you pin one visual as a time to a dashboard, and even by grouping these visuals, they still feature as separate visuals and then do not give the overall KPI card design as you would see it in the report itself.

That being said, let us jump in.

3 Options for Custom KPI card in Power BI

Custom KPI card #1

The visuals used in Option 1:

1. Clustered Bar Chart
2. Text boxes
3. Card
4. Table
5. Shape

All the visuals in this custom KPI card in Power BI:

First, you must create the measures you need for the calculations, in my case Total Sales and Target measure.  Then I also calculated the % change from the previous month.

The Clustered bar chart represents Sales and Target measures.  Then remove the y-axis and x-axis, all titles and backgrounds, and change the data colours to blue and the target to grey.  I do not add data labels simply, because I like them to be nice and big, and you are restricted on the graph.  I use cards as data labels, again removing all titles, labels, and backgrounds and changing the font, font size and font colour.

For the red/green arrow, write a piece of DAX to flag whether the sales are higher or lower than the previous month.  Then put this flag in a table and add conditional formatting by choosing the icon option.  Change the column header to the same colour as your background, white in my case.  Remove any borders.

Effectively changing the table as below.

For the card showing the change from the previous month.  I write some DAX with text in the message.

Finally, add a shape as a border to round off the design.

Custom KPI card #2

The second design is a little less layering than number 1, and a very easy one to create.

The visuals used in Option 2:

1. 2 x multi-row cards
2. Line graph
3. Text box
4. Shape

The multi-row cards display the current sales and target measures.  Change the font and font size.  Remove the bar on the left of the default version of the card.

In the line graph, remove all titles and x-axis and y-axis, change the thickness of the line, under shape in the format section.

Finally, for this custom visual in Power BI, you add a shape and add conditional formatting on the background to change colour, as set in DAX flag (see option 1 above).  It is your choice what you set as the decider, whether it be if you’ve reached the target or surpassed the previous month’s sales.

Custom KPI card #3

The visuals used in Option 3:

1. Text box
2. Card
3. Pie chart
4. Multi-row card
5. Area chart

For the third option, I added a coloured indicator using a pie chart.  Again this is up to you what the rule is for it to change colour.  I saw this great idea on Guy in a cube, thanx Patrick.

You need 2 DAX measures to create this.  One is to set the green colour and the other red.

Add both measures to the Value section of a pie chart.

Set the data colours for the pie chart under the formatting section.

Then format the pie chart by removing all titles, legends and resize it as desired.

Hopefully, this gives you some creative ideas to design your own Custom KPI card in Power BI.

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