Knowledge Base
Zebra BI for Power BI

Zebra BI Cards – Formatting options

Zebra BI Cards provide a simple and insight-rich reporting experience, with extensive flexibility for customization. This guide will walk you through the various formatting options available for each KPI card, ensuring your reports are both visually appealing and highly functional.

Formatting options for individual card

When dealing with multiple KPIs, presenting data with different units can be challenging. Zebra BI Cards allow you to format each KPI individually. Follow these steps to customize your KPIs

Hover over an individual card and click on the Focus mode:

  • Set Units: Change the value to a percentage or any other unit available in the dropdown (Auto, None, Thousands, Millions, Billions, or Percent)
  • Decimal Places: Display up to five decimal places on a card.
  • Currency Symbols: Select from several major currencies in the Symbol drop-down menu.
  • Invert: Some KPIs (like Costs and Expenses) need to have inverted colors to highlight their purpose. For example, increasing costs are a bad indicator, so it should be shown as red color.
  • Axis break: the scale of the main measures can be broken to highlight the importance of variances.

Tip: To apply axis break on all cards at once go to Settings -> Card -> Axis break -> ON

  • Background color and highlight both serve to emphasize a particular cards’ significance.
  • Reset to default: Restores all changes to the original state.

Global Toolbar

Practical and available directly in the visual. Appears only when hovering over the visual, giving you access to global formatting settings.

Layout

The layout options allow the entire visual to be arranged and organized in a specific manner. We can choose from three different options:

  • Custom layout – offers flexibility on an individual card level, meaning every card can get manually resized
  • Row layout – organizes all your cards on a vertical axis, having only one card in each row
  • Uniform layout – allows you to resize all your cards at once. Resizing the first card will also reflect on all the others.

Design

  • Card color > changes the background color of all cards
  • Card style > offers a selection between flat, elevated, or default style

Tip: Use colors meaningfully to make your reports actionable and easy to understand.

Fonts

With fonts, we have several options where we can make changes to the appearance of cards.

  • KPI Title
  • KPI Value
  • Variances
  • Chart labels

Change the chart type

Each card includes an integrated Chart visual. To change the chart type:

  • Individually: Use the Chart slider (arrow) on a card to access additional charts
  • Globally: Go to Settings -> Card -> Chart type -> Select a desired chart from the dropdown menu

Variances

By default, cards display a relative variance compared to the previous year or other measures. To customize variance display:

  • Individually: Click on the variance to access additional combinations of variances and numbers
  • Globally: Go to Settings -> Card -> Show variance

Automatic current period detection

By default, each card will display the summarized value of the displayed categories. However, by simply clicking on the value, you have the option to display your main value in three different ways.

  • Total -> displays a summarized value of all categories including the forecast value
  • Last category – displays the last available actual category value and highlights it in the chart
  • YTD – returns a summarized actual value, excluding the forecast value from the calculation

Flexible design options

Ultimately, as with all Zebra BI visuals, you can apply your own colors, and fonts or even upload your custom JSON file so that the report page matches your custom theme. Find out more about how to import and manage custom themes with JSON file

By following these steps, you can create visually cohesive and insightful Zebra BI Cards that align with your reporting needs and aesthetic preferences.

Was this article helpful?