Conditional Formatting in Microsoft Power BI

If you use Microsoft Excel, then you might be familiar with Conditional Formatting. Well, the good news is that you can also use it in Microsoft Power BI. It’s a little trickier to find, but well worth it if you want to make your visuals even more useful to viewers of your reports.

Conditional formatting does pretty much what it says on the tin, it formats data based on a condition. For example, you may want to show figures over a certain amount in red, or perhaps you want to see some data bars in a table. That’s the job of Conditional Formatting in Power BI.

Let’s get right to it.

I’ll use a table visualisation and add some conditional formatting to the Revenue field for this example.

Adding Conditional Formatting to a Power BI Table Visual

1. Ensure Power BI Desktop is open.
2. Select a Table visualisation on your page, making sure to select the entire visual rather than just a part of it.
3. In the Visualisation pane on the right, locate the column for which you want the formatting.
4. Click on the down arrow beside the column name.
5. From the drop down list, select Conditional Formatting, then choose from the options. In this example, Data Bars.
6. In the Data Bars dialog box, use the drop down lists and checkboxes to make your choices.
7. Click on the OK button when done.

In my example, I’ve selected Data Bars. This opens the Data Bars dialog box. I left the Format Style as the default. I also left the Minimum and Maximum at their defaults of Lowest and Highest values.

I want to change the colour, so I picked a light blue from the Positive bar drop down, and a red for the Negative bar. After I click OK, the Data Bars are displayed in the Revenue column of my table.

As a final touch, I clicked on the header of the Revenue column to sort it from highest to lowest revenue. That’s better, I can see my data exactly the way I want.

I hope you found this quick tip helpful in your Power BI journey. Cheers.