Customizing and Exporting Power BI Themes

The Power BI team just released a great new feature that allows you to customize existing themes and export your new version as a new theme! I love this functionality as it allows you to build upon other awesome themes and make them your own. The best part about this functionality is that you can edit a number of items directly within the UI of Power BI instead of writing custom JSON code.

As of December 2019, you will need to enable this feature in the preview features of your Power BI options. When you do so, make sure to restart your instance of Power BI Desktop.

To start using a theme, simply navigate to the View tab of the top ribbon and select one of the many included themes. Here’s an example where I am switching from my default coloring to a built-in theme:

Next, I can customize the theme by clicking on the same down arrow and selecting Customize current theme. Doing so will open the following dialog box which will present multiple options that you can customize to your heart’s content.

Change anything here that you like! I elected to change the default font size for default values and titles as well as the background color of the Filter pane. Once you click Apply and save, all the changes that you made will be applied.

I’ll skip the demonstration as this is pretty straight forward and should provide you with some visual feedback. The next awesome piece of functionality is the ability to export your customized theme as a JSON file that you can use in the future or share with others. Similar to the previous step, click the down arrow again and select Export current theme. This will allow you to save your custom json theme file to your files. When you open up a fresh Power BI report, you can import this theme by clicking the down arrow once again and selecting the Browse for themes option and selecting your exported file 😊

I hope you enjoy this new functionality within Power BI as much as I do! If you liked the blog post, make sure you subscribe to the BI Elite blog and BI Elite YouTube channel help you on your journey to become a Power BI Pro!