Changes to charts

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Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Part four of a six-part series of blogs
This blog shows the main changes which have been made to Power BI in the July, August, September and October updates, insofar as they affect report creators. Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Changes to themes and general formatting Changes to slicers Changes to charts (this blog) Changes to matrices Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI

Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop

Part four of a six-part series of blogs

This blog shows the main changes which have been made to Power BI in the July, August, September and October updates, insofar as they affect report creators.

Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop
Changes to themes and general formatting
Changes to slicers
Changes to charts (this blog)
Changes to matrices
Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 October 2026

In this blog

New Gantt chart (in preview)
Donuts now have centres
Outer padding
Changing the initial scroll position
Changing the plot area back colour

A summary of the changes introduced for Power BI Desktop charts over the July, August, September and October 2026 updates.

New Gantt chart (in preview)

There's a new chart visual, which although it's a preview feature is enabled by default:

The newest addition to the Power BI chart visuals.

Here's what one looks like (courtesy of Microsoft's blog explaining everything there is to know about using this new visual):

The Gantt chart does pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to.

If you have project plan data in suitable tables, the introduction of this new Gantt chart may change your life (or at least mean that you can stop using Project). For everyone else - including this owl - it perhaps should have remained as a custom visual.

Donuts now have centres

You can now display text in the middle of your donut charts, and format the centre to a ridiculous degree:

This donut chart is showing the total sales with a label above it, all on a green background.

Here are some of the relevant settings for the donut chart above:

Even by Power BI standards this is over-engineered!

Outer padding

Most of the main chart types have a new option which allows you to control the relative widths of (for example) the columns easily:

The options you can set.

Here are the formatting options which produced the chart above:

Leave space 80% of the width of a column to left and right, but only 10% of a column width between categories on the main axis of the chart.

Changing the initial scroll position

Where do you want to start scrolling in a chart: the beginning or the end?

Surely you'd always want your user to start scrolling at the beginning? Apparently not ...

For most standard chart types you can now change the initial scroll position:

For this column chart it would be an X axis setting.

I'm not convinced this change was needed, but maybe there's a use case I can't see.

Changing the plot area back colour

And finally, a change which has been announced but doesn't seem to work. You should be able to change the plot area back colour for most of the main chart types:

What you should be able to see.

However, try as I might I can't get these extra properties to appear (and Googling makes me think that there is a bug with this feature and it's been temporarily withdrawn).

Parts of this blog
Autumn 2026 - a summary of recent changes to Power BI Desktop Changes to themes and general formatting Changes to slicers Changes to charts (this blog) Changes to matrices Miscellaneous other changes to Power BI

Some other pages relevant to these blogs include:

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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New Gantt chart (in preview)

Donuts now have centres

Outer padding

Changing the initial scroll position

Changing the plot area back colour

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