Power BI Report skill

The Power BI Report skill (powerbi-report-cli) is a unified AI-agent skill for planning, designing, authoring, validating, and managing Power BI reports. It routes requests across four integrated capabilities—report planning, report design, report authoring, and report management—distributed as Markdown modules within one skill. Users install and invoke one skill rather than coordinating separate companion skills.

The skill works with PBIR (Power BI Report) definitions in PBIP (Power BI Project) files and with reports hosted in Microsoft Fabric. It is distributed through the Power BI authoring plugin in the Skills for Fabric marketplace.

Combined with the Power BI MCP servers and Power BI development tools, the skill supports an end-to-end workflow across semantic-model inspection, report planning, visual design, PBIR authoring, host-aware visual verification, and Fabric report management.

Integrated capabilities

The skill uses a shared entry point and loads the appropriate module or modules for each request.

Module	Responsibility
SKILL.md	Routes user intent, defines shared workflows and boundaries, and coordinates the capability modules.
report-planning.md	Gathers requirements, inspects dependencies, defines scope and audiences, creates the page plan, and records approval.
report-design.md	Produces or reviews layout, visual selection, information hierarchy, themes, colors, typography, and accessibility.
report-authoring.md	Creates and modifies PBIR/PBIP report definitions, validates their structure, and verifies rendered results through Power BI Desktop when available or a headless browser otherwise.
report-management.md	Lists, downloads, creates, updates, publishes, and deletes Power BI reports in Fabric workspaces.

These modules are implementation details of one skill. Users don't need to install or invoke them independently.

Choose the right workflow

The skill routes requests according to intent and can enter the workflow at any stage.

Request	Starting capability	Typical next step
“Build a sales dashboard”	Planning	Design, authoring, validation, and optional publishing
“What pages and KPIs should this report contain?”	Planning	Design or approval
“Make this report look professional”	Design	Authoring and visual verification
“Review this report's layout and accessibility”	Design	Approved design changes
“Add a card showing [Total Sales]”	Authoring	Validation and rendered-output verification
“Create a report from this semantic model”	Authoring, or planning when requirements are incomplete	Validation and optional publishing
“Validate or fix this PBIR report”	Authoring	Host-aware rendered-output verification
“Publish this report to a Fabric workspace”	Management	Confirm deployment result
“Download or update a report from Fabric”	Management	Authoring or local review

Common scenarios

Use the Power BI Report skill to:

• Plan a new report from an existing semantic model.
• Define report audiences, goals, pages, KPIs, filters, and delivery requirements.
• Create a design brief covering layout, visual selection, themes, colors, and typography.
• Critique and modernize an existing report while preserving its analytical intent.
• Create or modify pages, visuals, slicers, filters, bookmarks, formatting, and themes in PBIR.
• Replace legacy visuals with supported modern visuals and restore their field bindings and formatting.
• Diagnose empty visuals, error icons, invalid queryState, or incorrect role bindings.
• Validate report definitions and capture rendered screenshots through the powerbi-report-author CLI.
• Detect the available preview host and use Power BI Desktop when installed or the headless browser flow otherwise.
• Publish, download, update, list, or delete reports in Fabric workspaces.

Example prompts

• “Plan an executive sales report using this semantic model.”
• “Create a design brief for a three-page operations dashboard.”
• “Modernize this report and improve its visual hierarchy and accessibility.”
• “Add KPI cards, a clustered column chart, and a date slicer to the overview page.”
• “Validate the PBIR files and fix any structural errors.”
• “Detect the available preview host, verify the updated layout, and capture screenshots.”
• “Publish this report to the Finance workspace.”
• “Download the current Fabric report definition so I can edit it locally.”

End-to-end workflow

For a new report, use the following default workflow:

1. Plan — Identify the audience, business goals, required insights, semantic-model dependencies, page scope, and delivery target.
2. Design — Define each page's purpose, layout, visual hierarchy, chart choices, interactions, theme, and accessibility requirements.
3. Author — Create or update the PBIR files, bind visuals to model fields and measures, and apply formatting.
4. Validate — Run structural validation, and reload and inspect the report in Desktop;
5. Manage — Publish or update the report in the target Fabric workspace when deployment is requested.

You don't need the complete sequence for every task. A precise edit can begin with authoring, a visual-review request can begin with design, and a deployment request can begin with management.

The following chart shows the primary entry points and how work can move between capabilities:

Users can also start directly with Design, Author, Validate, or Manage when earlier stages are already complete.

How the skill complements Power BI tools

Layer	Tool or capability	Responsibility
Semantic model	Power BI MCP servers	Create and update tables, columns, relationships, measures, and DAX.
Report planning and design	Power BI Report skill	Define requirements, report structure, layout, visual choices, themes, and accessibility.
Report authoring and validation	Power BI Report skill with the powerbi-report-author CLI	Create and edit PBIR and PBIP definitions, validate structure, detect the preview host, and capture rendered screenshots.
Preview host	Power BI Desktop or headless browser	Use Desktop when installed; otherwise, use the headless-browser flow.
Fabric report lifecycle	Power BI Report skill	Create, download, update, publish, list, and delete Fabric report items.

Scope and boundaries

Choose this skill for the report layer: requirements, report structure, pages, visuals, filters, slicers, interactions, bookmarks, formatting, themes, validation, and Fabric report lifecycle operations.

For semantic-model development—including tables, columns, relationships, measures, and DAX—use the Power BI MCP servers.

Report management covers report items in Fabric. It doesn't replace workspace administration, deployment-pipeline administration, capacity management, or semantic-model permission management.

Considerations

• File support — Local report authoring requires PBIP projects that use the PBIR report format.
• Validation — Structural validation doesn't replace visual verification. Run the powerbi-report-author CLI host preview command after meaningful authoring changes. The agent uses Power BI Desktop when it's installed and falls back to the headless browser when it isn't.
• Source control — Commit a baseline before allowing an agent to make substantial PBIR changes so that changes can be reviewed or reverted.
• Source of truth — Save manual Power BI Desktop changes before asking the agent to modify the report. The PBIR files on disk are the source of truth for local authoring.
• Model dependencies — Report visuals depend on existing tables, columns, and measures. Create missing model objects with the modeling tools before binding report visuals to them.
• Legacy visuals — Avoid creating visuals scheduled for deprecation, including Q&A, Bing Maps, and filled maps. Prefer supported modern visuals.
• Auto-mode - Agent assumes all permissions are enabled in auto-mode; we recommend using "interactive" mode for production ready reports.