Labs · Power BI

Lab: Build and Format Five Core Visuals – Card, Bar, Line, Table and Matrix

By Ravindra Bagale · Last updated: 8 October 2026

Suppose we are…

Suppose we are a BI analyst at Croma, and the regional manager wants a first look at the 24 sample orders: "What are the totals? Which city sells most? Is 2026 better than 2025 month by month? Which product moves the most units? And give me city by year in one grid." Each question needs a different visual. The numbers are sample data made up for practice.

Goal of this lab

By the end you will have one report page with:

• 3 cards: Total Sales 1.30M, Units 95, Orders 24.
• A bar chart of Sales by City, sorted, with data labels.
• A line chart comparing 2025 and 2026 by month.
• A table of Units and Sales by Product.
• A City × Year matrix with totals.

What you need (all free)

• Power BI Desktop and Lab-11-star-schema.pbix from Lab 11 (it has the DateTable and Total Sales). No file? Build it first with these CSVs:
• Download pbi_sales.csv (24 orders) Download pbi_products.csv Download pbi_cities.csv
• 40 minutes.

The data: before and after

Before. Just rows. Nobody can answer the manager's questions by reading them.

After (1). Three cards answer "what are the totals?" in one glance.

After (2). The matrix answers City × Year with row and column totals.

The formula

Two small measures join the Total Sales measure from Lab 11:

Units  = SUM ( pbi_sales[Units] )
Orders = COUNTROWS ( pbi_sales )

COUNTROWS counts the rows of a table: one row per order, so 24. Always prefer measures in visuals over dragging raw columns: the name is clean ("Units", not "Sum of Units") and you can reuse it everywhere.

Steps

1. Open Lab-11-star-schema.pbix and File → Save as Lab-14-five-visuals. Delete any visuals on the page.
2. Right-click pbi_sales → New measure: Units = SUM ( pbi_sales[Units] ). Then another: Orders = COUNTROWS ( pbi_sales ).

3. Cards. Click empty canvas, click the Card icon, add Total Sales. Make two more cards with Units and Orders. Line them up across the top.

   👁 What you should see: 1.30M, 95 and 24.

4. Bar chart. Click empty canvas → Clustered bar chart. Y-axis: pbi_cities[City], X-axis: Total Sales. Click the … (More options) on the visual → Sort axis → Total Sales and Sort descending.

5. Select the bar chart → Format visual → Visual → Data labels: On. Then General → Title → Text: Sales by City.

   👁 What you should see: Mumbai 439K, Pune 346K, Nagpur 260K, Nashik 257K, largest at the top.

6. Line chart. Click empty canvas → Line chart. X-axis: DateTable[Month], Y-axis: Total Sales, Legend: DateTable[Year]. Title: Sales by Month, 2025 vs 2026.

   👁 What you should see: two lines from January to December; the 2026 line stops at June. January: 60K (2025) vs 100K (2026).

7. Table. Click empty canvas → Table. Add pbi_products[Product], Units and Total Sales. Click the Units column header in the visual to sort by it.

   👁 What you should see: Headphones 36, Mobile 26, Smartwatch 18, Laptop 15 units; Total 95 and 1,302,000.

8. Matrix. Click empty canvas → Matrix. Rows: pbi_cities[City], Columns: DateTable[Year], Values: Total Sales.

   👁 What you should see: the same grid as the After (2) image, with totals 818,000, 484,000 and 1,302,000.

9. Consistent formatting. Select the bar chart, click Home → Format painter, then click the line chart. Repeat for the table and matrix. Then for each visual set General → Title → Font size to 14.

10. Select each card → Format visual → Visual → Callout value and check display units: Total Sales on Auto (1.30M), Units and Orders on None.
11. Save.

Common mistakes

Self-check checklist

Try-at-home challenge

Add one more measure, Avg Order Value = Total Sales ÷ Orders, show it as a fourth card, and find which city has the highest average order value using a table.

Avg Order Value = DIVIDE ( [Total Sales], [Orders] )

Samjla ka? Card for a number, bar to compare, line for time, table for detail, matrix for two categories. Aata pudhe jaauya: put Maharashtra on a map and fix the wrong locations.