Report authoring overview

Power BI comes with many out-of-the-box visuals. These visuals are available in the visualization pane of both Power BI Desktop and Power BI service, and can be used to discover meaningful insights about your data. You can develop your own Power BI visuals, to be used by you, your organization, or the entire Power BI community. You can also edit or customize your visuals, reports, and dashboards using Edit mode in Power BI embedded analytics.

The visualization APIs for Power BI allow you to personalize your visuals as needed.

Your visual might be an area chart, filled map, matrix, or other visual type. After creating a visual, you can change its type if you decide the visual doesn't convey the information as well as you would like. For example, you can change a pie chart to a bar chart. In addition, if your application users don't like a visual in the report, it can be removed.

After creating a visual, you can bind data to it so that you can control the data that's displayed. You can control the visual's displayed data programmatically by using the add and remove data fields APIs.

You can retrieve, set, or reset visuals' properties, such as the color or size of a visual's title. There are readily available properties for out-of-the-box visuals. For custom visuals, all the properties that were defined when the visual was created are available.

The Power BI Report Authoring library is an extension for the Power BI Client library, and makes it easy to quickly author a Power BI report.

Limitations

Only out-of-the-box visuals, custom visuals that are installed from the marketplace, or visuals imported from a file can be created using the APIs. createVisual or changeType fail if the target visual type is not installed.

Next steps