Power BI Bar Chart Rounded Corners

Do you want to know how to build rounded corners for the Power BI Bar chart?

In this Power BI tutorial, we’ll explore how to achieve rounded corners in the Power BI bar chart.

Unfortunately, Power BI lacks a built-in feature for rounding corners in bar charts. However, we can utilize custom visuals to achieve this effect.

I recently found a workaround to create rounded corners in the Power BI bar chart without using custom visuals.

The idea involves using the Error bar feature. So, instead of having the left bar chart, we can build a chart with rounded corners on the right.

Table of Contents

Power BI bar chart with rounded corners

Here, we will learn how to create a bar chart with rounded corners in Power BI.

For this workaround, I will use the Financial sample data, to create a bar chart that will display Sales based on Segment.

Here, first, we will enable the On Object Interaction feature in Power BI Desktop. Which will add features like an error bar and a New format pane to the Power BI Desktop.

By using these two features, we can create a rounded corner bar chart in Power BI Desktop. For this, follow the below steps.

Open Power BI Desktop, click on the Excel workbook, or click on Get ->select Excel Workbook from the data source option.
From the Navigator window, select the table and click on the Load button.
To enable the On-Object Orientation feature from the Preview feature. For this, click on the ‘File‘ -> select Options and Setting-> select the Options-> click on Preview Feature -> check the box next to the On-object interaction. Then click on OK.

Bar chart with rounded corners in Power BI

Now save the file in your system and close the Power BI. Reopen it.
Once you reopen the file, you can see a different preview of Power BI Desktop.

Bar chart with rounded corners in Microsoft Power BI

To start with a workaround, we will select the Line chart because the Error bar is currently not available for the bar chart in Power BI.
Then, drag and drop the sales and segment columns to the Y-axis and X-axis fields.

Bar chart rounded corners in Microsoft Power BI

Next, click on the paint icon, then click on the More option, to open the Format pane.

Bar chart rounded corners Microsoft Power BI

Now the Format pane will open on the right side, then scroll down to Error bars.

Bar chart with rounded corners Microsoft Power BI

Now expand the Error bars section, then expand the Options section, and toggle on the button.

Next, we will set the Lower and Upper bounds of Error bars.
The upper bound will correspond to the value used as the Y-axis, which in this case is the Sales amount.
The lower bound will be set to zero since negative sales are not applicable in this dataset, making this approach suitable (this method is particularly effective when your values consistently have a baseline of zero).
For the lower bound, I simply created a measure similar to the one below:

Lower bound = 0

Set the lower bound and upper bound. Click on Add data and select the Sales column from the table under Upper bound.

To set the lower bound, click on Add data and select the Lower bound measure from the table under Lower bound.

Format a bar to have rounded corners in Power BI

Now, the line chart looks like the below screenshot.

As it doesn’t look like bars, we will format the bars, so it will look like bars.
In the Error bars section, expand the Bars section and increase the Width to 10.
To make the bar corner rounded, select the circle in the marker shape option.
Change the border color to the marker color.
Increase the marker size to 7.
Increase the Border size to 2 px.

How to create a Rounded Bar chart in Power BI

As we don’t want a line, so we will remove the line, for this expand the Lines section in the Format pane.
Then, Expand the Shape section. And make the stroke width to 0.