Power BI Custom Visuals: When and How to Use Them

Power BI's built-in visuals cover most reporting needs: bars, lines, tables, matrices, cards, maps and more, all maintained by Microsoft and supported everywhere Power BI runs. Custom visuals fill the gaps, from specialised charts to novel layouts. They also bring third-party code into your reports, with consequences for data handling, licensing and features that are easy to miss. This guide covers where custom visuals come from, what certification means, and how to decide whether one belongs in a report.

Where visuals come from

Microsoft describes three main sources (Microsoft Learn: sources of custom visuals):

• Core visuals in the Visualizations pane of Power BI Desktop and the service.
• AppSource visuals, developed by Microsoft and community members, downloaded through Get more visuals in Power BI or from the AppSource website.
• Your own visuals, built with the Power BI visuals SDK and packaged as .pbiviz files.

Organisations add a fourth channel: an organisational store, where Power BI administrators approve and deploy visuals for report authors, and can update, disable or enable them centrally. Authors find these under the My organization tab of the Get more visuals window.

What certification means

Some AppSource visuals are certified. Certified visuals meet the Power BI team's code requirements and pass tests designed to check that the visual does not access external services or resources (Microsoft Learn: certified visuals). They carry a badge, and the Get more visuals window can be filtered to show only certified ones.

Two cautions apply. Microsoft is not the author of third-party visuals and advises contacting the author to confirm how a visual behaves. And certification is optional, so a visual can be uncertified for legitimate reasons: a map that must call an external mapping service, or one that uses commercial libraries, cannot be certified.

The risks to weigh

Microsoft's documentation is explicit about several:

• Data can leave your boundary. Visuals built with the SDK may import data from, or send data to, a third party or a service outside your tenant's geographic area or compliance boundary. For confidential data, that alone can rule a visual out.
• Automatic updates. Visuals imported from AppSource may be updated without further notice, so a report can change behaviour without anyone editing it.
• Licensing. Downloading from AppSource is free, but each publisher sets its own model: free, licensed through the Microsoft 365 admin center, or basic features free with paid extras. Some licensed visuals cannot enforce licensing in environments such as Report Server, sovereign clouds, embedding where the app owns the data, and Publish to web.
• Files from unknown sources. Microsoft warns that a custom visual could contain code with security or privacy risks, so import .pbiviz files only from authors and sources you trust.
• Feature gaps. Beyond export and subscriptions, bookmarks can misbehave with some custom visuals; Microsoft suggests raising such problems with the visual's creator (Microsoft Learn: bookmarks).
• Abandonment. A visual whose developer stops maintaining it can leave important reports depending on unsupported code.

A checklist before adding a custom visual

1. Can a core visual do it? Formatting, conditional formatting, small multiples and visual calculations cover more than many authors expect.
2. Will readers understand it? A novel chart that needs explaining often communicates less than a plain bar chart.
3. Is it approved or certified? Prefer your organisation's store, then certified AppSource visuals.
4. Where does data go? If it may call external services, check that with whoever owns data protection.
5. What does it cost, and for whom? Check the Plans and Pricing tab and who needs licences to view it.
6. Does it support what the report needs? Test export, subscriptions, bookmarks, drillthrough, tooltips, mobile layout and accessibility.
7. Is it maintained? Look at the update history and the publisher's support.
8. Does it perform? Test with realistic data volumes; a slow visual slows the whole page.

Each AppSource visual offers a sample report to download, which is a quick way to test it before adding it to real work.

How to add one

In Power BI Desktop or the service, open the Visualizations pane, select the ellipsis, then Get more visuals. Choose My organization for approved visuals, or AppSource with the Power BI Certified filter for public ones. Select a visual and choose Add; it appears in the Visualizations pane for that report. Importing from a .pbiviz file is also available from the same menu, for visuals built in-house or supplied by a trusted vendor.

Governance for teams

In organisations, individual authors adding visuals ad hoc leads to inconsistency and risk. A better pattern is for administrators to review requests, approve suitable visuals in the organisational store, and manage their versions there, disabling any that should no longer be used. A short register of approved visuals, their owners and the reports that use them makes updates and removals manageable.

When a custom visual is the right call

Custom visuals earn their place when they answer a question no core visual can, for an audience that will understand them, with data that may safely be processed by the visual. Specialised charts for specific domains are common examples. For everything else, a well-formatted core visual is easier to maintain, supported everywhere, and understood by more readers. Power BI dashboard design covers choosing visuals by the question, and conditional formatting shows how much core tables and matrices can do. For interactivity without custom code, see bookmarks and buttons.

Custom visuals are covered in the advanced Power BI concepts module of the Power BI course.

Sources

• Main sources for acquiring Power BI custom visuals (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
• Get your Power BI visuals certified (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn
• Create report bookmarks in Power BI (Microsoft Learn) — Microsoft Learn