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The Power BI Report Design skill (powerbi-report-design) is an AI-agent skill that supplies opinionated design guidance for Power BI reports — archetype routing per page, chart selection, color, typography, layout, accessibility, anti-pattern detection, and an opinionated theme preset. It's distributed as part of the PowerBI authoring plugin in the Skills for Fabric marketplace.
The Report Design skill decides what a report should look like and why. It does not write PBIR files. After producing a structured design brief, it hands off to the Power BI Report Authoring skill for all file mechanics: page and visual creation, theme registration, expression encoding, formatting, and validation.
Common scenarios
The Report Design skill works best when the user's intent is design-shaped rather than file-shaped.
Example use cases:
- "Build a sales report for the executive team."
- "Design an ops monitoring page for the on-call rotation."
- "Make this report look professional."
- "What should this report look like?"
- Critiquing or redesigning an existing report's layout, color, and visual mix.
- Producing a multi-page composition for a "cover everything" request (Executive landing + Comparative ranking + Analytical exploration + optional Narrative timeline).
How it complements the Report Authoring and Planner skills
The Design, Planner, and Authoring skills form a design → plan → author pipeline. The Power BI Report Planner skill orchestrates the entire end-to-end flow. It calls the Power BI Report Design skill for design guidance, then the Power BI Report Authoring skill for PBIR file mechanics, and the Power BI Report Management skill for Fabric publishing.
| Phase | Skill | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Investigate the semantic model | Report Design | Tables, columns, measures, distributions, magnitudes |
| Route per-page archetype + variant | Report Design | Archetype + layout_variant + variant_rationale per page |
| Pick chart types | Report Design | Visual type per analytical question |
| Configure visuals + theme | Report Design | Sort, color, labels, theme JSON |
| Emit design brief | Report Design | YAML brief with wireframes |
| Validate brief against pre-flight checklist | Report Design | Reviewed brief |
| Author PBIR files | Report Authoring | report.json, page.json, visual.json, theme.json |
| Validate + reload + screenshot | Report Authoring | Verified rendering |
The brief is the contract between the two skills. It specifies what to build. The authoring skill decides exact pixel coordinates, PBIR expression encoding, and visual container objects on its own.
Considerations
- Design first, file mechanics second — The skill produces a brief, not PBIR files. Hand off to the Report Authoring skill for implementation.
- Vague prompts get options, not guesses — The skill is built to stop, offer 2–3 named options, and proceed only after the user picks (or after at most two clarifying rounds with a documented assumption).
- Existing themes are respected — The skill won't overwrite a user's existing theme without asking. It adapts selectively or applies the base theme as
customThemealongside it.
Next steps
- What is the Power BI Report Authoring skill?
- What is the Power BI Report Planner and powerbi-report-management skill?
- Power BI MCP servers overview