Curated and generated palettes get you close. Build gets you exactly there: you edit each colour, keep the ones that must not change, and make the ramps Power BI uses for conditional formatting and heat maps.
Edit your colours
Open Build in Report Design Studio. It starts from the palette in use. For each colour you can:
- Type a hex code, or use the colour picker
- Drag the ⠿ handle to reorder it, or focus the handle and press the up or down arrow
- Press × to remove it (a palette needs at least two colours)
When you are done, click Apply to preview.
Order matters. Power BI gives the first colour to the first series, the second to the second, and so on. Put your main brand colour first and the colours that must stay distinct next to it.
Lock the colours that must not change
Click the lock on a colour to lock it. Lighten and Darken then adjust every other colour and skip the locked ones. Lock your brand colours, then lighten or darken the rest until they sit well around them.
A locked colour cannot be removed until you unlock it, so it cannot disappear by accident.
Make a sequential ramp
Conditional formatting colours a value by how high it is, like a heat map in a table. That needs an ordered scale, not a set of distinct colours.
Sequential makes a light to dark scale of eight colours from your first colour. It steps evenly in perceived lightness, so each step looks like the same amount of change. Use it for values that only go up: sales, counts, percentages.
Make a diverging ramp
Diverging makes nine colours running from a low colour through a centre to a high colour: your first colour, the one in the middle of your list, and your last. It needs at least two valid hex colours; with only two, a light grey is the centre. Use it for values with a meaningful middle: growth against zero, actual against target, above or below average.
Either ramp replaces the palette in use, in order, so the preview shows it on the charts. Keep it as the theme's palette for a report built on ordered data, or copy its hex codes (Copy all, above the preview) into the colour scale of a conditional formatting rule in Power BI.
Use a scientific colormap
Under the ramps are one-click scientific colormaps: Viridis, Cividis, Magma, Mako, Cool–Warm and Brown–Teal. They are perceptually uniform (every step looks as big as the next) and stay readable for people with colour vision deficiencies. Click one to use it as your palette.
They are the standard choice for encoding magnitude. Cividis in particular was designed to look nearly the same with and without colour blindness.
Know which to use when
| Your data | Use |
|---|---|
| Categories, like regions or products | A palette of distinct colours |
| Amounts that only go up | A sequential ramp or a colormap like Viridis |
| Values around a middle | A diverging ramp or Cool–Warm |
The next lesson moves from colour to style: the report font and how every visual looks.