How to Use Templates in Power BI (+Our Favorites!)

Creating reports in Power BI is a beautiful, artistic, and fun experience. Until you get obsessed over how your report looks and what more visuals you can place.

Power BI templates are based on existing report templates which you can use to jump-start your reports. Templates are also a good way to standardize your reports.

A Power BI report template (or report layout, as others call it) contains:

• Report pages and visuals
• Schema, relationships, measures, and other data model definition
• Queries, query parameters, and other query elements

In short, a template has all the elements of the existing template except for the report’s data.

Under the hood, a report layout is a PBIT file compared to the PBIX file of a Power BI Desktop report which contains data.

Although you can create reports in Power BI Service, you can only import/export Power BI templates in Power BI Desktop.

As stated earlier, you can also create your own templates out of existing templates that you made or downloaded.

And if you know how to create report layouts, then you can download those reports and make a template out of them.

For this example, let’s use the Retail Analysis Sample’s reports, specifically the “Overview” report:

Let’s assume that you like the layouts in this report and you would like to have similar layouts on all your overview reports.

To make a template out of this report, click ‘File’ on the tab list:

Then, hover your mouse over ‘Export’ and select ‘Power BI template’:

Power BI will then ask you to provide a description of your template.

Let’s describe this template as “Standard overview template for future sales report”:

After pressing ‘OK’, name the file and save it to your preferred location.

Let’s name this template “Standard Overview Template”:

As you’ve noticed, the template has a PBIT file extension.

Congratulations! You have just created your first Power BI template! 🎊

Now that you have created your first Power BI template, let’s discuss how to load or use one.

On a new Power BI Desktop canvas, click ‘File’ again on the tab list.

This time, hover your mouse over ‘Import’ and select ‘Power BI template’ from the options:

Find the template file and open it.

For this exercise, Power BI will ask your approval about the native query in this template.

If you approve, just click ‘Run’:

If the report, like in our example, needs to connect with a SQL server and you don’t have access to it, you would encounter errors like the one below:

Just close the window to proceed.

Since there was no data yet, here’s how the report looks:

After you specify the data sources and parameters, you’ll immediately see the visuals come to life.

As promised, we’ll be showing you 7 of our favorite templates online.

It would probably be a crime not to include this awesome layout by the Microsoft team in September 2018. Thanks to Power BI Tips and Tricks, we can now have a copy of our own.

Link: Power BI September Microsoft Blog Layout

This cool report shows a snapshot of all relevant data with a user-centric view which provides a detailed analysis. Though you don’t have to be an airport authority to use this, this report is a great way to monitor all related activities and make quick decisions when needed.

Link: Airport Authority Performance Summary

At first glance, you would immediately understand how serious the mortality rate is for each cancer type per state. Imagine using the same layout for how well your business is doing in different places.

Link: Cancer Analytics

Are you looking for a simple layout design? This “Basic Layout” template is designed for everyone who needs a simple good looking report with lots of visuals.

Link: Basic Layout

This colorful report about opioid crisis investigation belongs to this list not only because of its looks. Its functionality is superb as well! Visit the report and see what we mean.

Link: Power BI Gartner Bakeoff Opioid

This is another custom layout made by Power BI Tips and Tricks. As you can see, the report looks pretty simple but packed with stunning visuals. On the upper left side, you can include your company logo or just a report icon.

Link: Left Slicers with Logo Layout

If you’re in sales, you would like this one! This report gives its user a full view of the store sales performance. You can also see the key indicators with insights about the sales by country, category, and sub-category. All the important information is displayed so you can make quick decisions.

Link: Global Super Store

As you can see, you can quickly come up with reports complete with awesome-looking visuals by using a template. There are different templates available for different needs. All you have to do is search for it.