22-25 April 2026

Get Creative with Power BI: Make these core visuals shine!

Regular 50 minute session for SQLBits 2026

TL; DR

This session shows how to create clear, intuitive and action-driven Power BI reports using only core visuals. We focus on understanding your audience, improving visual clarity with DAX, and highlighting the information that truly matters for decision-making.

Session Details

Creating reports with Power BI may seem easy at first. However, many people eventually discover that their reports are not being viewed, end-users are confused about navigation, and the whole development process is more complicated than anticipated. This session will address these challenges and provide you with the skills to create visually appealing and actionable data visualizations that serve a clear purpose and effectively guide end-users to take action.

In this session, I will show how to create data visualizations that are visually appealing, intuitive, and actionable, only using Power BI core visuals. Since many of us are creating reports for others who eventually need to maintain them themselves, I think it is important not to involve too many external tools and additional code and instead focussing on keeping it simple and insightful.

The techniques you will learn are practical and can be immediately applied to your work. You will learn how to:

- Ask the right questions to get to know your audience.
- Use DAX to Enhance Visuals: Learn how to modify your visuals using DAX, such as changing colors and highlighting important information, to make critical insights stand out.
- Focus on Key Information: Learn techniques to refine your visuals so they display the most critical data, making sure users can quickly see what matters most.

Join me as we explore how to create insightful, user-friendly visualizations using only Power BI's core visuals, no SVGs or external tools required.

3 things you'll get out of this session

Understand what your audience needs and how that shapes your report.
Use DAX to strengthen visuals and highlight what matters.
Create clear, action-driven visuals using only Power BI core visuals.