Report Design with AI

Report design is more subjective than DAX or Power Query, so AI works best here as a brainstorming partner — proposing layouts, visual choices, and structure to react to — rather than a tool that produces a finished report on its own.

What AI Can Help With

Dashboard Layout Ideas

Describing the audience and the questions the report needs to answer, rather than asking for "a good layout," tends to produce more useful suggestions.

Prompt:
"I'm building a sales executive dashboard. The audience is regional VPs who check it
weekly. Key questions: are we hitting quarterly targets, which regions are behind,
and what's driving any variance. Suggest a page layout and which visuals to use."

Choosing the Right Visual

Describing the data and the comparison being made is enough to get a recommendation, and a rationale worth checking against the site's own guidance in Charts.

Prompt:
"I want to show sales trend over the last 12 months, broken out by 4 product categories.
Line chart, area chart, or something else?"

Improving an Existing Report

Describing an existing page's visuals and layout can surface issues — too many visuals competing for attention, inconsistent color use, unclear labeling.

Prompt:
"This report page has 9 visuals: 3 KPI cards, 2 bar charts, a matrix, a line chart,
a map, and a slicer, all on one page. What would you simplify or restructure?"

Storytelling and Narrative Flow

AI can suggest an order for a multi-page report — the sequence a reader should move through, what belongs on a summary page versus a detail page — based on the intended audience and decision the report supports.

Cautions

• AI can't see the actual report, only a description of it. A screenshot-based review by a person, or user testing with real viewers, will catch things a text description misses.
• Visual recommendations are general best practice, not a hard rule — some AI suggestions won't fit the organization's existing report theme or accessibility requirements. See Report Themes for house style constraints.
• Good report design depends heavily on who's actually going to read it. A layout suggestion for "executives" and one for "analysts doing deep exploration" should look different — make sure the audience described in the prompt matches the real one.

A Reasonable Workflow

Describe the audience and the key questions the report answers
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Get layout and visual-choice suggestions
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Cross-check against house style / report theme guidelines
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Validate with a real viewer from the intended audience, not just visually

Next Steps

• Model Advisor
• Prompt Library
• Charts