Power BI Visuals

Power BI Visuals Skill

Create and manage visuals on PBIR report pages. No Power BI Desktop connection is needed -- these commands operate directly on JSON files.

Adding Visuals

# Add by alias (pbi-cli resolves to the PBIR type)
pbi visual add --page page_abc123 --type bar
pbi visual add --page page_abc123 --type card --name "Revenue Card"

# Custom position and size (pixels)
pbi visual add --page page_abc123 --type scatter \
    --x 50 --y 400 --width 600 --height 350

# Named visual for easy reference
pbi visual add --page page_abc123 --type combo --name sales_combo

Each visual is created as a folder with a visual.json file inside the page's visuals/ directory. The template includes the correct schema URL and queryState roles for the chosen type.

Prerequisite: Measures Must Exist in the Semantic Model

visual bind writes field references into the visual JSON. It does not create measures — it only records that a measure should exist. If the measure is missing from the TMDL, every visual bound to it will show an error in Desktop.

Before binding any visual to a measure, verify the measure exists:

# Option A: create it via pbi-cli (requires pbi connect)
pbi connect
pbi measure create "Total Revenue" -e "SUM(Fact_Sales[Total_Revenue])" -t Fact_Sales

# Option B: check existing measures in the TMDL file directly
# Look for `measure '...' =` lines in SemanticModel/definition/tables/*.tmdl

After adding measures directly to a TMDL file (without pbi connect): close and reopen the .pbip file in Power BI Desktop. Desktop only reads TMDL on file open — it does not hot-reload TMDL changes made on disk.

Checklist before opening Desktop:

• Every --field, --value, --indicator reference points to a real measure or column in the TMDL
• Table names match exactly (case-sensitive in PBIR): "Fact_Sales" ≠ "fact_sales"
• Measure names match exactly: "Total Revenue" ≠ "Total_Revenue"

Binding Data

Visuals start empty. Use visual bind with Table[Column] notation to connect them to your semantic model. The bind options vary by visual type -- see the type table below.