Colours are half of a report's look. The other half is structure: borders, corners, spacing, shadows, how busy the charts are. Setting those in the theme means every visual starts consistent, and new ones follow. This lesson styles them all at once.
Open Visuals in Simple mode
Open Visuals in Report Design Studio. At the top, Live preview shows a sample visual, Sales by Month, reflecting your settings. Below it, the mode switch offers Simple and Advanced. Stay in Simple: a few controls that apply to every visual.
Everything here is written into the theme's visualStyles, the part of the theme JSON that holds formatting defaults.
Shape the container
Under Container:
- Border: a line around each visual, on or off
- Rounded corners: how round the corners are
- Padding: the space inside each visual, between its edge and its content
- Drop shadow: a soft shadow that lifts the visual off the page
A modern, calm look: no border, slightly rounded corners, some padding and a light shadow, on a background a little darker than the visuals. The Layout section (a later lesson) makes that background.
Calm the charts
Under Charts:
- Gridlines: show or hide the lines behind chart values
- Data labels: show the values on the bars and points
- Legend: where the legend goes, or none
A rule of thumb: either gridlines or data labels, rarely both. Labels suit charts with few values; gridlines suit many values where labels would crowd.
Reset when you went too far
Reset global style to defaults? resets borders, corners, shadow, padding, gridlines, data labels and legend in one step, after asking. Use it to compare your style with Power BI's own defaults.
Set the font to match
The Fonts section sets the font family for the whole report, used by titles, labels, tables and cards. Choose one that reads well small: Segoe UI (Power BI's default) and Verdana are clear at small sizes; Georgia and Cambria give a more editorial feel for titles.
The preview uses web fonts that match each Power BI font, so what you see is close to the report even on a computer without the font installed. The exported theme names the real font.
Check on the full report
Switch back to the full preview and look at the page as a whole. Consistent corners and spacing make a report look designed; that is what the theme is for. If one kind of visual needs something different (a table without shadow, a card with a bigger title), the next lesson styles one visual at a time.